William Holden Western Movies to Watch Free.
William Holden (April 17, 1918 – November 12, 1981) was an American actor, who was one of the biggest box office draws of the 1950s. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1953 for his role in Stalag 17, and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for his role in the 1973 television film The Blue Knight. Holden starred in some of Hollywood’s most popular and critically acclaimed films, including such blockbusters as Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, Picnic, The Towering Inferno, and Network. He was named one of the “Top 10 Stars of the Year” six times (1954–1958, 1961), and appeared on the American Film Institute’s AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars list as number 25.
Holden was born William Franklin Beedle, Jr. in O’Fallon, Illinois, the son of Mary Blanche (née Ball; 1898-1990), a schoolteacher, and William Franklin Beedle, Sr. (1891-1967), an industrial chemist. He had two younger brothers, Robert and Richard. Holden’s paternal great-grandmother, Rebecca Westfield, was born in England in 1817, while some of his mother’s ancestors settled in Virginia’s Lancaster County after emigrating from England in the 17th century. His younger brother, Robert W. “Bobbie” Beedle, became a U.S. Navy fighter pilot and was killed in action in World War II, over New Ireland, on January 5, 1944.
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His family moved to South Pasadena when he was three. After graduating from South Pasadena High School, Holden attended Pasadena Junior College, where he became involved in local radio plays. Contrary to legend and theatre publicity, he did not study at the Pasadena Playhouse, nor was he discovered in a play there. Rather, he was spotted by a talent scout from Paramount Pictures in 1937 while playing the part of an 80-year-old man, Marie Curie’s father-in-law, in a play at the Playbox, a separate and private theatre owned by Pasadena Playhouse director Gilmor Brown. His first film role was in Prison Farm the following year.
Holden’s first starring role was in Golden Boy (1939), in which he played a violinist-turned-boxer. Next he starred with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in the Warner Bros. gangster epic Invisible Stripes later the same year, followed by the role of George Gibbs in the film adaptation of Our Town. After Columbia Pictures picked up half of his contract, he alternated between starring in several minor pictures for Paramount and Columbia before serving as a 2nd lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, where he acted in training films for the First Motion Picture Unit. Beginning in 1950, his career took off when Billy Wilder tapped him to star as the down-at-the-heels screenwriter Joe Gillis, who is taken in by faded silent-screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard, for which Holden earned his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Following this breakthrough film, his career quickly grew in stature as Holden played a series of roles that combined good looks with cynical detachment, including a prisoner-of-war entrepreneur in Stalag 17 (1953), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, a pressured young engineer/family man in Executive Suite (1954), an acerbic stage director in The Country Girl (1954) with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, a conflicted jet pilot in the Korean War film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), a carefree playboy in Sabrina (1954), a wandering college football star in Picnic (1955), a dashing war correspondent in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), his most widely recognized role as an ill-fated prisoner in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with Alec Guinness, a World War II tug boat captain in The Key (1958), and an American Civil War military surgeon in John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (1959) opposite John Wayne.
Holden also played a number of sunnier roles in light comedy, such as the handsome architect pursuing virginal Maggie McNamara in the controversial Production Code-breaking The Moon Is Blue (1953) with David Niven, as Judy Holliday’s tutor in Born Yesterday (1950), as a playwright captivated by Ginger Rogers’ character in Forever Female (1953) and as Humphrey Bogart’s younger brother, a playboy, in Sabrina (1954), which also starred Audrey Hepburn. In 1954, Holden was featured on the cover of Life.
On February 7, 1955, Holden appeared as a guest star on I Love Lucy as himself. His career peaked in 1957 with the enormous success of The Bridge on the River Kwai, but Holden spent the next several years starring in a number of films that rarely succeeded commercially or critically. By the mid-1960s, the quality of his roles and films had noticeably diminished. In 1969, Holden made a comeback when he starred in director Sam Peckinpah’s graphically violent Western The Wild Bunch, winning much acclaim. Also in 1969, Holden starred in director Terence Young’s family film L’Arbre de Noël, co-starring Italian actress Virna Lisi, based on the novel of the same name by Michel Bataille. This film was originally released in the United States as The Christmas Tree and on home video as When Wolves Cry.
Acting credits
1981 S
Tim Culley
1980 The Earthling
Patrick Foley
1980 When Time Ran Out…
Shelby Gilmore
1979 Ashanti
Jim Sandell
1979 Escape to Athena
Prisoner smoking a cigar in prison camp (uncredited)
1978 Damien: Omen II
Richard Thorn
1978 Fedora
Barry ‘Dutch’ Detweiler
1976 Network
Max Schumacher
1976 21 Hours at Munich (TV Movie)
Chief of Police Manfred Schreiber
1974 The Towering Inferno
Jim Duncan
1974 Open Season
Hal Wolkowski
1973 Breezy
Frank Harmon
1973 The Blue Knight (TV Movie)
Bumper Morgan
1972 The Revengers
John Benedict
1971 Wild Rovers
Ross Bodine
1969 The Christmas Tree
Laurent Ségur
1969 The Wild Bunch
Pike Bishop
1968 The Devil’s Brigade
Lt. Col. Robert T. Frederick
1967 Casino Royale
Ransome
1966 Alvarez Kelly
Alvarez Kelly
1964 The 7th Dawn
Major Ferris
1964 Paris When It Sizzles
Richard Benson / Rick
1962 The Lion
Robert Hayward
1962 The Counterfeit Traitor
Eric Erickson
1962 Satan Never Sleeps
Father O’Banion
1960 The World of Suzie Wong
Robert Lomax
1959 The Horse Soldiers
Maj. Henry Kendall
1958 The Key
Capt. David Ross
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai
Shears
1956 Toward the Unknown
Maj. Lincoln Bond
1956 The Proud and Profane
Lt. Col. Colin Black
1955 Picnic
Hal Carter
1955 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
Mark Elliott
1955 I Love Lucy (TV Series)
William Holden
– Hollywood at Last (1955) … William Holden
1955 Lux Video Theatre (TV Series)
Intermission Guest
– Love Letters (1955) … Intermission Guest
1954 The Country Girl
Bernie Dodd
1954 The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Lt. Harry Brubaker
1954/I Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
Narrator in original US version (uncredited)
1954 Sabrina
David Larrabee
1954 Executive Suite
McDonald Walling
1953 Escape from Fort Bravo
Capt. Roper
1953 Forever Female
Stanley Krown
1953 Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach
Tourist (uncredited)
1953 The Moon Is Blue
Donald Gresham
1953 Stalag 17
Sgt. J.J. Sefton
1952 The Turning Point
Jerry McKibbon
1952 Boots Malone
Boots Malone
1951 Submarine Command
Lt. Cmdr. Ken White
1951 Force of Arms
Sgt. Joe ‘Pete’ Peterson
1950 Born Yesterday
Paul Verrall
1950 Union Station
Lt. William Calhoun
1950 Sunset Blvd.
Joe Gillis
1950 Father Is a Bachelor
Johnny Rutledge
1949 Dear Wife
Bill Seacroft
1949 Miss Grant Takes Richmond
Dick Richmond
1949 Streets of Laredo
Jim Dawkins
1948 The Dark Past
Al Walker
1948 Apartment for Peggy
Jason Taylor
1948 Rachel and the Stranger
David Harvey
1948 The Man from Colorado
Capt. Del Stewart
1947 Variety Girl
William Holden
1947 Dear Ruth
Lt. William Seacroft
1947 Blaze of Noon
Colin McDonald
1943 Reconnaissance Pilot (Documentary short)
Lt. ‘Packy’ Cummings (uncredited)
1943 Young and Willing
Norman Reese
1942 Meet the Stewarts
Michael Stewart
1942 The Remarkable Andrew
Andrew Long
1942 The Fleet’s In
Casey Kirby
1941 Texas
Dan Thomas
1941 I Wanted Wings
Al Ludlow
1940 Arizona
Peter Muncie
1940 Those Were the Days!
P.J. ‘Petey’ Simmons
1940 Our Town
George Gibbs
1939 Invisible Stripes
Tim Taylor
1939 Golden Boy
Joe Bonaparte
1939 Million Dollar Legs
Graduate Who Says ‘Thank You’ (uncredited)
1938 Prison Farm
Prisoner (uncredited)