Earl Holliman, Actor on ‘Police Woman,’ Dies at 96
Earl Holliman, the actor best known for playing Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s NBC cop drama Police Woman, has died. He was 96.
Holliman died Monday in hospice care at his home in Studio City, his spouse, Craig Curtis, told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Holliman won a best supporting actor Golden Globe for portraying Katharine Hepburn’s girl-crazy kid brother in The Rainmaker (1956) — he beat out Elvis Presley for the role — and then appeared in another Burt Lancaster film, as Wyatt Earp’s assistant in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957).
In the George Stevens epic Giant (1956), the Louisiana native played the son-in-law of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson’s characters, was the cook in Forbidden Planet (1956) and appeared as the brother of John Wayne, Dean Martin and Michael Anderson Jr. in Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).
Holliman also portrayed a man with amnesia in a deserted town on the very first episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, “Where Is Everybody?” which premiered on Oct. 2, 1959.
Also during the 1959-60 TV season, Holliman starred as Sundance, a Colorado gunslinger-turned-marshal with a sidekick — a dog named Useless — on the short-lived Hotel de Paree.
Three years later, Holliman toplined another TV Western, NBC’s Wide Country; he played a rodeo star on that Ralph Edwards-produced series, but that lasted only a season as well.
Holliman replaced Bert Convy after the pilot to star as the macho Lt. Bill Crowley on Police Woman, which aired from 1974-78. He shared a pleasant chemistry with Dickinson, who starred as LAPD undercover cop Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson, on the series’ four seasons.
“She’d get into trouble and I’d run in and save her,” Holliman, talking about a typical Police Woman storyline, said in a 2003 interview. “I would make some smart remark and she would come back at me in some sexy kind of way, and a lot of that was ad-libbed. We had a tacit kind of permission to do that.”
Henry Earl Holliman was born on Sept. 11, 1928, in Delhi, Louisiana. His natural father died six months before he was born, and Holliman was placed in an orphanage before being adopted when he was a week old.
“When [his adoptive parents] came to see me, I was sick and they took me right away to the doctor, who apparently said, ‘You don’t have a baby here, you have a funeral expense,'” he said. “They paid the midwife $7.50 for me — this was in the backwoods of Louisiana.
“I had wonderful parents who gave me all the love in the world. They encouraged me to be whatever I can be. I was their only child.”
Holliman dreamed about becoming an actor, and when he was 14, shortly after his father died, he hitchhiked from a relative’s home in Texarkana, Texas, to the outskirts of Hollywood.
He was talked into returning home, so he came back to Oil City High School, where he played tackle on the football team and was voted president of his senior class.
After a stint in the U.S. Navy, Holliman studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and made his professional debut with one line of dialogue as an elevator operator in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy Scared Stiff (1953).
He had minor roles in four other films that year, and in 1954, he played Spencer Tracy’s son in Broken Lance and appeared with William Holden and Grace Kelly in The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
In 1957, Holliman starred on an installment of CBS’ Playhouse 90 called “The Dark Side of the Earth,” which was written by Serling. That put him on the writer’s radar for The Twilight Zone.
Holliman received another Globe nomination in 1993 for playing a gruff bar owner on the short-lived ABC series Delta, starring Delta Burke, and he portrayed Luddie Mueller on the landmark 1983 ABC miniseries The Thorn Birds.
His other TV credits included Gunsmoke, Cannon, Bonanza, Slattery’s People, The Fugitive, Dr. Kildare, The Six Million Dollar Man, Empty Nest, Murder, She Wrote and Caroline in the City.
Holliman also was in such as films as I Died a Thousand Times (1955), Hot Spell (1958), Last Train From Gun Hill (1959), Summer and Smoke (1961), A Covenant With Death (1967), The Power (1968), Anzio (1968), The Biscuit Eater (1972), Bad City Blues (1999) and The Perfect Tenant (2000).
Holliman ran the Fiesta Dinner Theatre in San Antonio for many years and served as president of Actors and Others for Animals, which promoted animal population control.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
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