Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who earned accolades in stage and screen productions of “Death of a Salesman” but will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His death was confirmed by his daughter Lillah McCarthy.

That is not how I remember him, at all. Although, if I try to nail down a specific role or film, I can not do so easily. A look at his filmography shows a lot of TV work: 203 entries going back to 1944.

Mr. McCarthy, whose sister was the celebrated author Mary McCarthy, was 35 and a veteran of seven Broadway plays when Elia Kazan cast him as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. 

Five years and four forgettable films later Mr. McCarthy was cast in a low-budget B movie about a small California town where the residents are gradually replaced by pods from outer space. The pods, resembling giant cucumbers, bubble and foam as they slowly turn into creepy, emotionless duplicates of the townspeople. Miles Bennell (Mr. McCarthy), a handsome bachelor doctor, and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), a beautiful local divorcée, spend the movie trying to escape podification (mostly just by staying awake; the transformation takes place while people are sleeping) and warn others. The movie, selected for the National Film Registry in 1994 and named one of the Top 10 science fiction films of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008, came to be regarded as a metaphor for the paranoia of the era’s Communist witch hunts. But the film’s leading man, like many moviegoers at the time, saw it differently, as a warning about mindless conformity.

United Artists-Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956)

“I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Mr. McCarthy told The Bangor Daily News in Maine in 1997.


Over the decades Mr. McCarthy came to embrace the cult immortality he achieved with “Body Snatchers,” but he cheerily played hundreds of other roles in feature films and on television (including multiple appearances on series from “Studio One” in the 1950s to “The District” in 2000) and continued his stage career. He toured the United States as Harry S. Truman in the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” for two decades.

Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and their four children were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather. After graduating from high school in Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an eye toward a diplomatic career. He changed his mind, however, and transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he became interested in acting. After moving to New York he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” His career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a military police officer. After his discharge he became an early member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting.


Despite his film and television success Mr. McCarthy never abandoned the stage. The 18 Broadway productions in which he appeared included Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” (in which he was billed as Sgt. Kevin McCarthy), the political drama “Advise and Consent,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Kurt Vonnegut’s irreverent “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” Mr. McCarthy matured quickly into roles as judges, generals, politicians and other men of power — sometimes not very nice ones. On “Flamingo Road,” the soapy 1980s television series, he was a greedy small-town Florida millionaire. On the screen, in “The Best Man” (1964), he was a presidential candidate’s henchman, specializing in dirty tricks, and he played a similarly ignoble political type in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992). In “Innerspace” (1987) he was a devious industrial spy, in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), a grabby publicist.


And although he did relatively little science fiction after “Body Snatchers,” he did star in the horror comedy “Piranha” (1978) as a mad scientist breeding killer fish. He also made a cameo appearance in the 1978 remake of “Body Snatchers,” playing a man who throws himself at the car driven by Donald Sutherland (the remake’s star), shouting, “Help! They’re coming! Listen to me!” and sounding much like his character in the original film. His bad guys weren’t always all bad. He was a roguish poker player in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady” (1966) and Marilyn Monroe’s attractive but distant ex-husband in “The Misfits” (1961).


Mr. McCarthy continued acting well into his 90s. His last screen appearances were in 2009 in “Wesley,” (2008), an 18th-century costume drama, and the short film “I Do.” He married the actress Augusta Dabney in 1941, and they had three children. They divorced in 1961. (Ms. Dabney died in 2008.) In 1979 he married Kate Crane, a lawyer, and they had two children. Ms. Crane survives him, as do three daughters, Lillah, of Los Angeles; Mary Dabney McCarthy, of Cape Cod; and Tess McCarthy, of New York City; two sons, James Kevin McCarthy of San Diego and Patrick McCarthy of Portland, Ore.; a stepdaughter, Kara Lichtman of Boston; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. Mr. McCarthy’s sister died in 1989.

Interviewers rarely asked him about subjects beyond “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (He loved to tell the story about leaving Ms. Wynter a nostalgic trans-Atlantic telephone message: “Becky, it’s Miles. Wake up!”) But in 1991 he told a critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune about his feeling that purposeful employment was a remedy for many ills. “I try to get as much work as I possibly can,” Mr. McCarthy, then 77, said. “I love to work. I love to be in things.”

September 12, 2010 - Kevin McCarthy, Actor, Dies at 96
By ANITA GATES