Born: January 15, 1913
Died: March 10, 1998

Working from the ground up in stock companies, Lloyd Bridges was a member of the progressive Actors Lab company in the mid 1930s. He made his Broadway debut toward the end of that decade in a production of Othello. Signed by Columbia in 1941, Bridges appeared in everything the studio assigned him, from Three Stooges 2-reel comedies to such "A" pictures as Here_Comes_Mr._Jordan (1941), Talk of the Town (1942), and Sahara (1943). He began freelancing in 1945, accepting the prescient role of a deep-sea diver in 1948's 16_Fathoms_Deep, among other films. The most memorable of his '50s assignments was the leading role in the cult science-fiction programmer Rocketship X-M (1950) and the part of the look-out-for-number-one deputy in High_Noon (1952).


Thanks to his earlier involvement in the Actors Lab and his admission at the HUAC hearings that he'd once flirted with communism, Bridges was "graylisted" during the mid-'50s, able to find work only in lesser pictures and TV shows. He was rescued by producer Ivan_Tors, who cast Bridges as diver-for-hire Mike Nelson in the TV series Sea Hunt. Filmed between 1957 and 1961, Sea Hunt was the most popular syndicated program of the era, turning Bridges into a millionaire. Alas, neither of his subsequent series of the '60s, The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962) and The Loner (1965), survived their first seasons. Undaunted, Bridges continued working into the '90s, displaying a hitherto untapped flair for zany comedy in such films as Airplane! (1980), Joe vs. the Volcano (1990), and the two Hot_Shots films. Bridges was the father of actors Beau_Bridges and Jeff_Bridges. A committed environmentalist, he was involved in several organizations including the American Oceans Campaign and Heal the Bay, a Los Angeles-based group. Bridges died of natural causes on March 10, 1998. Shortly before his passing, he had completed work on two films, Jane_Austen's_Mafia and Meeting_Daddy; in the latter film, Bridges co-starred with his eldest son Beau. Hal Erickson, Rovi

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