Larry Hagman
Larry Hagman is an actor, born 1931.
Being Mary Martin's son got Larry Hagman through the door of a business he then spent more than fifty years quietly outworking. He came up in live television in the 1950s, on The Edge of Night, DuPont Show of the Month and Sea Hunt, and found his first real audience as Major Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie, the astronaut with a genie in a bottle and the permanent expression of a man trying to keep a secret at work.
Film used him as dependable support: Buck in the Cold War thriller Fail Safe, Eddie Coombes in Harry and Tonto, Dick Benson in Blake Edwards's S.O.B., a parking lot doctor in the disaster spoof The Big Bus.
Then came Dallas, and a second career that swallowed the first. J.R. Ewing worked because Hagman declined to play him as a villain. He plays a man having an extremely good time: the smile arrives before the knife, the drawl slows down exactly when the deal turns, and the audience is invited to enjoy the ruthlessness instead of deploring it. That is a hard trick, and it held a prime time soap together from 1978 to 1991, then held the 2012 revival together as well.
Late film work traded on the same public persona to real effect, as the folksy governor in Primary Colors and in Nixon, with a knowing turn as Burt Landau on Nip/Tuck. He worked as a producer and director too, and he died in 2012, still playing J.R.
Movies (14)
TV (11)
Where to start with Larry Hagman
Dallas is the reason to be here, and the trick with a soap that long is to treat it as a place to visit rather than a box to finish. The early seasons establish J.R., and the pleasure is watching a man enjoy being awful without ever winking at the camera. Dallas picks him up decades on, older and no less pleased with himself.
For the other Hagman, I Dream of Jeannie is the whole of his first career, sunny and daft and entirely dependent on his flustered reactions.
On film, Fail Safe is the best thing he was ever in, a Cold War procedural staged like a play, and Harry and Tonto is the warmest. S.O.B. puts him inside Blake Edwards's poison pen comedy about Hollywood, and Primary Colors gives him the finest of his late roles, a governor who looks far too decent for the campaign closing in around him.