Quintessential blue-collar actor William Bendix was often cast as a guy from Brooklyn or the Bronx, although he was a native of the Manhattan neighborhood of Murray Hill. He dropped out of high school to be a bat boy for the New York Yankees and Giants, and first got involved with the theatre with the Henry Street Players. For a time he worked as a singing waiter and a grocer and then got involved with the Federal Theatre Project and the Theatre Guild, which led to a series of roles on Broadway: The Trial of Dr. He read as a Regular Joe. The Broadway attention allowed him to give Hollywood a shot. That same year came yet another defining role, one Bendix would play in three different media for close to 15 years: that of Chester A.
WILLIAM BANDIT, ACTOR, 58, IS DEAD; Stage and Screen Veteran Capped Career With Riley
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Dorothy Comingore - Turner Classic Movies
He was 58 years old. Bendix, who entered the hospital last Tuesday, was suffering from lobar pneumonia and malnutrition resulting from a stomach ailment. The role of funny, shadowboxing barkeep, with which Mr. Returns on Mr.
The Hairy Ape
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It is about a beastly, unthinking laborer known as Yank, the protagonist of the play, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich. At first, Yank feels secure as he stokes the engines of an ocean liner, and is highly confident in his physical power over the ship's engines and his men. However, when the rich daughter of an industrialist in the steel business refers to him as a "filthy beast", Yank undergoes a crisis of identity and so starts his mental and physical deterioration. He leaves the ship and wanders into Manhattan , only to find he does not belong anywhere—neither with the socialites on Fifth Avenue , nor with the labor organizers on the waterfront. In a fight for social belonging, Yank's mental state disintegrates into animalistic, and in the end he is defeated by an ape in which Yank's character has been reflected.
