William Scott "Jack" Elam (November 13, 1920 – October 20, 2003) was an American film and television actor best known for his numerous roles as villains in Western films, and later in his career, comedies (sometimes spoofing his villainous image). His most distinguishing physical quality was his misaligned eye. Before his career in acting, he took several jobs in finance and served two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Elam performed in 73 movies and in at least 41 television series.
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Early life
Born on November 13, 1920, in Miami, Arizona, a small mining town located 85 miles east of Phoenix, Jack was one of two children of Millard Elam and Alice Amelia, née Kerby. Jack's father supported the family by working assorted jobs over the years, including stints as a carpenter, millman, and accountant. The Elams by 1924 had moved from Miami to the nearby community of Globe, Arizona, where in September that year Alice died at the age of 40, succumbing to what state medical records cite as a three-year struggle with "general paralysis". After their mother's death, young Jack and his older sister Mildred went to live with various family members until Millard married again in April 1928 to Kansas native Flossie Varney. Federal census records show that two years later, the children, their father, stepmother, and Flossie's own mother were residing together in Globe, where Millard had a new job as an investigator for a loan company. Flossie was employed, as well, at the time as a public-school teacher, while Jack also contributed to the family's income by periodically working on nearby farms gleaning cotton.
Eye injury
In 1931, Elam suffered a severe injury to his left eye during an altercation with another boy, an injury that ultimately blinded him in that eye and permanently damaged the muscles surrounding it. As Jack grew older, the impaired muscles caused his eye increasingly to "drift" within its socket and not track in unison with his right eye, often giving him a cock-eyed appearance. Percy Shain, a veteran film and television critic for The Boston Globe, interviewed Elam in 1974 and quoted the actor's comments about the injury:I lost my eye when I was 11 in a fight at—would you believe it?—a boy scout meeting...It was a big initiation night, but I got into a scrap with this other kid and he put a pencil through my eye. There was no doctor there and it wasn't looked at until sometime afterward. They finally took out the lens and made it sightless. It was 20 years, though, before it started drifting. If it became an issue I could have it operated on, but at this stage of life I probably won't.There was a time, though, when I was making Rawhide, the movie [1951], that I mentioned to Darryl Zanuck [head of 20th Century-Fox] that I could have it fixed. He said, "Don't do it. It's part of your mystique." So I never got back to it and it's become my trademark, in a way. At this stage, it only causes me minor inconvenience. Sometimes I'm a little off center, or when I'm talking to someone I do it at a slight angle.
Zanuck's remarks about Elam's eye proved to be wise career advice, for despite any lifelong disadvantages that his "lazy eye" created for him personally, it proved to be an asset professionally, at least as a performer. His eye's distinctive appearance, combined with Elam's natural acting abilities, drew the attention of many casting directors of films and television series throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Education, military service, and jobs prior to acting
Before becoming an actor, Elam completed his high-school education, got married, attended college, worked in a variety of jobs, and despite being blind in one eye, served two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a supply officer. He completed his secondary education in Arizona, graduating from Phoenix Union High School in the late 1930s and then moving to California, where he majored in "business studies" at Modesto and Santa Monica junior colleges. During that time, he was also employed in several positions before entering military service, including work as a salesman for a "house trailer agency", as an accountant for the Standard Oil Company, a bookkeeper at the Bank of America, and a manager at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.
For a few years after his discharge from the Navy, Elam continued to apply his business training as an accountant for Hopalong Cassidy Productions and as an independent auditor for Samuel Goldwyn and other moguls and companies associated with the film industry. That work required Jack to spend long hours each day reading and examining in detail large quantities of financial records, a routine that put too much strain on his right eye, his "good eye". "'I only see out of one eye'", he explained in an interview published in The Baltimore Sun in 1974, "'and that eye kept going shut.'" While Elam was widely recognized in Hollywood as "a leading independent auditor in motion pictures", by 1947, he found it necessary to quit that successful occupation entirely. He added, "'I had [my right eye] operated on several times and finally the doctor said he couldn't open it any more. He told me I had to get out of the business immediately or go blind.'"
Acting career
Elam made his screen debut in 1949 in She Shoulda Said No!, an exploitation film in which a chorus girl's habitual marijuana smoking ruins her career and then drives her brother to suicide. Over the next decade as an actor, Elam continued to perform most often in gangster films and Westerns, firmly establishing himself in those genres as a reliable and memorable villain or "heavy". In fact by the end of the 1950s, various American news outlets and moviegoers were referring to him as "the screen's most loathsome character".
On television in the 1950s and 1960s, he made multiple guest-star appearances on many popular Western series, including The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Lawman, Bonanza, Cheyenne, Have Gun – Will Travel, Zorro, The Rebel, F Troop, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Texan, and Rawhide. In 1961, he played a slightly crazed bus passenger on The Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?". That same year, he also portrayed the Mexican historical figure Juan Cortina in "The General Without a Cause", an episode of the anthology series Death Valley Days. In 1962, Elam appeared as Paul Henry on Lawman in the episode titled "Clootey Hutter".
Elam was the antagonist of the 1960 film The Girl in Lovers Lane, which was subsequently the subject of a season-five episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In 1963, Elam portrayed a heroic character, appearing as the reformed gunfighter Deputy US Marshal J. D. Smith in the ABC/Warner Bros. series The Dakotas, a Western intended as the successor of Cheyenne. The Dakotas ran for 19 episodes. He was then cast as George Taggart, "a former gunfighter who has become a U.S. marshal", in the 1963–1964 NBC/WB series Temple Houston.
In 1966, Jack Elam was cast in his first comedic role by Paramount Pictures, playing Hank in the Western film The Night of the Grizzly starring Clint Walker. The next year, for the Harold Hecht production The Way West, he was chosen for another light-hearted role, playing Preacher Weatherby and providing support to costars Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, and Kirk Douglas in a story about a wagon train traveling the Oregon Trail. Then in 1968, Elam performed in the opening scenes of Sergio Leone's celebrated "spaghetti Western" Once Upon a Time in the West. In that film, he portrays one of a trio of gunslingers sent to a train station to kill Charles Bronson's character. Elam, in one sequence, spends a good portion of his screen time simply trying to rid himself of an annoying fly, finally capturing the elusive insect inside the barrel of his pistol.
Personal life and death
Elam was married twice, first to Jean Louise Hodgert from 1937 until her death from colon cancer on January 24, 1961. Seven months later, in August 1961, Elam married again, then to Margaret M. Jennison. The couple remained together for 42 years, until October 20, 2003, when Jack died of congestive heart failure at their home in Ashland, Oregon.
Filmography
Awards and recognition
1983: The 1st Annual Golden Boot Awards
1994: National Cowboy Hall of Fame, at the Western Heritage Center.
