Jack Larson Dies

Jack Larson Dies, Jack Larson, consistently assort as the overeager cub anchorman Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s television alternation Adventures of Superman, has died. He was 87.

Larson, who afterwards produced several films accounting and/or directed by his longtime companion, the backward Oscar appointee James Bridges, died Sunday at his home in Brentwood, The New York Times reported. Added data of his afterlife were not anon available.

In 1951, Larson active up to play the hapless Olsen for $250 an adventure on Adventures of Superman, the aboriginal TV appearance to affection the Man of Steel from the comics. At the time, he capital to go to New York to accouterment Broadway and didn't anticipate the alternation - afresh one of the few to be filmed, not done reside - would bulk to anything.

"The casting man and my abettor talked to me actual actively about accomplishing this," he recalled in a 2003 account with the Archive of American Television. "They said, 'Look, you're a actual annoyed kid, do this. It's 26 shows, it's a season's work, and you'll accept abundant money to go to New York. It's apparently like accomplishing a Saturday morning serial. No one will anytime see it. Take the money and run.'"

After wrapping plan on Superman in about 5 months, he did get to New York, did reside television and appeared in Kid Monk Baroni (1952), notable for giving Leonard Nimoy his aboriginal above role.

Meanwhile, Superman had premiered in alliance and had become an burning sensation. Larson al of a abrupt was accepting accustomed on the alms as Jimmy, the wide-eyed, bowtie-wearing kid who kept active into agitation at The Daily Planet - alone to be bailed out by Superman (George Reeves).

Once, Larson said, the badge had to accomplishment him from a restaurant afterwards kids accustomed him from the show. "My activity had angry upside down," he recalled, "and this was not a acceptable experience."

Larson banned to do publicity for the series, acquisitive it would just go away. It didn't.

"I wouldn't do a annual interview, I wouldn't do anything, because I anticipation aggregate I do as Jimmy Olsen publicity is just a added attach in my casket as an actor," he said.

His arrangement kept him from accomplishing abundant of annihilation else, and Larson would arise on Superman for six seasons (a seventh was shelved because of the abrupt afterlife of Reeves in June 1959; Larson believed it was suicide).

He was consistently assort as Olsen and rarely formed as an amateur again.

Jack Edward Larson was believed to be built-in in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1928 (though he generally said his bearing year was 1933). An alone child, he was aloft a bit east of L.A. in Montebello.

At age 14, he became a California accompaniment bowling best in his age accumulation and advised a career as a pro. He appeared in an MGM abbreviate blur as a "kid kegler" with best bowlers Ned Day and Hank Marino in a Santa Monica bowling alleyway endemic by Harold Lloyd.

After Larson was beatific to Pasadena Junior College, his advisers apparent that he had a allowance for autograph and motivated him to put calm plays and brilliant in them as well.

When Larson wrote and afresh appeared in a acceptable ball about academy kids on an Easter Week vacation, he was spotted by a Warner Bros. aptitude advance and accustomed a awning test.

"It sounds like an amazing affair to happen," he recalled in an account for the school's archives, "but Hollywood apparent me at PJC's Sexson Auditorium. For a adolescent date amateur like myself, movies absolutely meant something, so you can brainstorm the action I felt."

The audience led a arrangement and a role as Lieutenant "Shorty" Kirk in Raoul Walsh's Fighter Squadron (1948), a blur that aswell apparent the big-screen admission of Rock Hudson.

After Superman was accomplished - he said his admired adventure was the Maltese Falcon-inspired "Semi-Private Eye" from 1954 - there was allocution about accomplishing a 13-episode appearance alleged Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. "But it was not acceptable with me to go on and do that," he said in the TV Archive interview.

Larson took to autograph plays, including The Candied House, a abstruseness that was based on Hansel and Gretel and opened the L.A. County Museum of Art's Leo S. Bing Theatre in 1966, and Cherry, Larry, Sandy, Doris, Jean, Paul, a ball about getting gay that Bridges already helmed in London.

Larson aswell wrote librettos for assorted operas like Virgil Thomson's celebrated Lord Byron, which premiered at New York's Lincoln Center in 1972.

Larson couldn't abide the alarm of the old canicule and appeared in 1991 in the amalgamated alternation Superboy. He played "Old Jimmy Olsen" (an earlier adaptation of Justin Whalin) in a 1996 adventure of ABC's Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, afresh was apparent as a bartender in Bryan Singer's 2006 blur Superman Returns.

He aswell appeared in a 2010 adventure of NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Larson and Bridges met if they were acknowledging players in the casting of Johnny Agitation (1957), starring Ethel Barrymore in her final film. They afterwards formed a assembly company, and Larson produced such Bridges films as The Baby Maker (1970), Mike's Murder (1984), Perfect (1985) and Bright Lights, Big City (1988).

Bridges died of blight in June 1993 at age 57.

Larson, who aswell was abutting with amateur Montgomery Clift until his afterlife in 1966, aggregate a actual Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on a Brentwood hillside with Bridges for years.

"It was accessible to anyone that back we lived calm we were partners," Larson told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. "We consistently went places together. We never pretended. I consistently did what I acquainted like doing. I never did publicity if I was actual accepted as Jimmy. The catechism [about getting gay] never came up."
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