Kevin McCarthy Passed Away at 96

Los Angeles (GaeaTimes.com) - The stage, television and screen star Kevin McCarthy, one of the best known actors of Hollywood of 1956 breathed his last on Saturday at Cape Cod hospital Hyannis, Massachusetts. Spokesman Dave Riley didn’t reveal the cause of death or any other details.

Kevin McCarthy was best known for his starring role as the panicked doctor who tried to warn the world about the alien “pod people” in the 1956 science-fiction classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, the film flopped at the box office as it was considered too barren for the audiences of that time.

Stranger, one his other films, was an interesting one. In one shot, McCarthy’s character is teasing his girlfriend Nancy Gates. He seemed amiable enough here, but turns out to be less heroic, particularly when put against lead Joel McCrea. McCarthy ought to have been in more Westerns. For a certain movie worm, McCarthy is one of those man, one of those faces, one of those presences, that’s almost a self-evident part of cinema. He was huge, enormous and intimidatingly large. The chisel-jawed actor performed in more than 100 movies of the 7 decades of his life and he was nominated for an Oscar as “Biff” in 1951’s Death of A Salesman and was omnipresent in primetime.

He was the brother of writer/critic Mary McCarthy. He and his sister Mary were orphaned after their parents died because of an epidemic flu in 1918. After that, he took upon acting as his career and his sister became a famous novelist, essayist and critic. His sister died in the year of 1989, her best work were the bestselling novel “The Group”.

Soap fans will remember him for his role as Claude Weldon on FLAMINGO ROAD in the early 1980s. He also appeared on both DYNASTY and THE COLBYS but as different characters.