Ed Flanders the finest actor in America?

in talent •  2 years ago 

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Norman Lloyd, when he was asked what made the series Saint Elsewhere great, numbered a couple of things, and then said that they got for the chief character "the finest actor in America" -- Ed Flanders.

That's some compliment, and it's kind of strange, when you think about it, because I doubt that Ed Flanders was ever a household name. He didn't star in any series, not that I recall, but you'd find him doing great jobs in a wide variety of roles, for all kinds of shows -- Hawaii Five-O, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, etc. Maybe he had a big Broadway career, but I don't remember that. We used to get reviews and reports on Broadway shows in our daily newspaper (The Scranton Tribune, long since absorbed into The Scranton Times), so when I was a kid I got to recognize the names of Richard Dysart and Anthony Hopkins (from Equus), and Theodore Bikel (from The Fiddler on the Roof), but I don't remember Flanders' name.

Anyway, Norman Lloyd, who died a year or so ago, past the age of 100, had been around television and the silver screen for a very long time, and not just as an actor -- as a director and producer, too, and he was a good friend of Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he collaborated on many a project. So he was a shrewd judge of talent. So then, how can you actually be the best actor in the United States, and somehow only Norman Lloyd and some people like him are aware of it? But that may happen to artists, composers, musicians, architects, and poets, too; it seems to have happened, to a lesser degree, to Jane Austen, the young Robert Browning, George Herbert, perhaps (because of modernist smugness) to John Singer Sargent in his later years...

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