Harve Presnell

Harve Presnell stood nearly six and a half feet tall and had a voice that could crack marble. Before becoming the gruff father-in-law of independent film, he was a Broadway star who commanded astronomical fees. In 1960 he made his stage debut in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and that overnight changed his bank account forever.

And audiences went wild.

MGM paid him a fortune to reprise the role in the film version of 1964. He co-starred with Debbie Reynolds and proved that a baritone could be a leading man of the kind Hollywood no longer made. At that point, his salary reached figures that few stage actors dream of earning over an entire lifetime of performances.

The Disaster of Inflated Budgets

In 1969 he appeared in Paint Your Wagon. The production was total chaos, with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin trying to sing while the budget spiraled out of control. Presnell was the only one who really knew how to carry a tune, but the movie flopped spectacularly at the box office.

That flop closed the doors of the major studios to him for decades.

He turned to touring theater and his ranch because movies no longer wanted operatic voices. For twenty years, his name vanished from movie theater marquees. But the obscurity was not permanent, and his comeback came from an unexpected place.

The Coen Brothers' Redemption

In 1996, directors Joel and Ethan Coen were looking for a man who looked like a block of granite for Fargo. Presnell came to the casting call and landed the role of Wade Gustafson without breaking a sweat. His performance as the wealthy, stubborn father-in-law restored the relevance he had lost in the seventies.

He no longer needed to sing to command respect.

From that point on, his phone started ringing again for high-ranking military officers and figures of authority. He appeared in big-budget productions such as Saving Private Ryan and Face/Off in 1997. His imposing presence was enough to fill the frame (and to intimidate far younger stars).

In 2007, he appeared in Evan Almighty, and a year later he was in the film Old Days. He kept working steadily until pancreatic cancer abruptly stopped him. He died in June 2009 at a Santa Monica hospital at the age of 75.