
Venom eddie bracken movie#
In 1939, he was co-starring on Broadway in “Too Many Girls,” a Rodgers and Hart musical, when he caught the eye of Hollywood, which brought him out to appear in the movie version. By the end of the national tour, his leading lady, Constance Nickerson, became his wife.
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He received his big break in the mid-1930s when director George Abbott cast him as the lead in the national touring company of “Brother Rat,” a comedy about life in a Virginia military academy.īracken went on to appear in Abbott’s Broadway production of the comedy “What a Life,” the forerunner to the radio and film series about teenager Henry Aldrich, whom Bracken played when the play went on tour. While in elementary school, he began appearing as the rich kid in “The New York Kiddie Troupers,” a series of silent movie shorts filmed in New York.Īs a teenager, he toured the country in a show called “Lottery,” a parody of early melodramas. Bracken would sing and dance and then take home first prize. He was part of that whole thing.’ ”īorn in Astoria, Queens, in 1915, Bracken was 4 or 5 when he began a show that became an older brother to amateur contests at the Astoria Grand Theater. “He’d tell Preston Sturges stories, and I’d sit there and think, ‘He was actually there. Whenever he could, Hughes said, he would sit and chat with Bracken, this “direct link” to Sturges and old-time Hollywood. “He was a very dignified man and just so tremendously skilled in that old style.” “You’d see him arrive, and you’d think it was a poet laureate or something you didn’t think it was this comic actor,” Hughes recalled. Hughes first met Bracken on the set of “Vacation,” the 1983 comedy starring Chevy Chase, which marked a return to the big screen for Bracken.

‘What were you saying?’ He could turn that on a dime.” The reason we used him in ‘Vacation’ was that tongue-tied bit that he did, where he’s about to blow up and then he just stops.


“There was a real sort of boy-next-door quality to him,” Hughes told The Times Friday. Writer-director-producer John Hughes, who worked with Bracken on three of his later films - “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” and “Baby’s Day Out” - describes Bracken’s ‘40s-vintage screen persona as “sweet and manic.” In the satirical “Hail the Conquering Hero,” he plays a small-town military reject who unwillingly poses as a Marine war hero who is caught up in a wave of hometown hero worship.
