HSRC on the Radio: Burgess Meredith (1907-1997)

Monday, September 19 at 9:30am on WRCR 1700AM

Tune in to the next Crossroads of Rockland History on Monday September 19 right after the morning show on WRCR 1700AM Radio Rockland, when we’ll turn our attention to the life and legacy of actor Burgess Meredith (1907-1997), who lived in Pomona for 30 years.

Meredith’s son, Jonathan Meredith, will join Clare Sheridan to share his memories of his father, growing up in Rockland County and his father’s eclectic group of creative friends and neighbors including Maxwell Anderson, Alan Jay Lerner and others.

Tune in locally on 1700AM or download the TuneIn Radio app and search for WRCR. After the broadcast, the program will be streaming on all major podcast platforms and the HSRC website.
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Jonathan Meredith is a professional musician currently living in Grass Valley, CA. As a teen, he collaborated with Tony and Hunt Sales (sons of comedian Soupy Sales), and fellow Rocklander Jon Pousette-Dart to form a group called Tony and the Tigers. The group opened for the Animals at Steel Pier in Atlantic City and performed twice on the popular television program, “Hullabaloo.” Tony and the Tigers split when Jonathan and Jean-Pierre had to leave because their grades at school were slipping.

Burgess Meredith, the raspy-voiced character actor with unruly hair and a grimacing yet humorous nature displayed versatile acting skills that kept him before cameras or onstage for more than 70 years. If the phrase “actor’s actor” has any validity, Meredith was its prototype.

Meredith, whose early credits included “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” found an entire new career late in life as a scheming villain on television and as Rocky Balboa’s crusty manager in films.

Meredith began life as George Burgess, son of a Cleveland doctor. The family dissolved early on and Meredith said he took solace in acting in school plays. He was accepted at Amherst College on a scholarship in 1926. But finances forced him to leave school, and he worked as a merchant seaman, a tie salesman and a peddler of vacuum cleaners before drifting to New York and Eva Le Gallienne’s Student Repertory Group.
“I had no money,” Meredith said in a 1976 interview. “But Eva took me in.” He left her group for roles in “Threepenny Opera,” “Little Ol’ Boy,” “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” and many other Broadway and off-Broadway productions in the early 1930s.

Playwright Maxwell Anderson, who was living in Rockland County at the time, became aware of Meredith’s talents and wrote a play called “Winterset” with Meredith in mind. A melodrama of a son out to avenge his father’s death, it became not only a Broadway hit in 1935 but also a motion picture a year later with Meredith recreating his role as the son, Mio. Mio was the first of three stage portrayals that established Burgess Meredith as a significant actor. The other two were Van Van Dorn, who escapes civilization for a single evening in “High Tor” (1937), and Stephen Minch, who is permitted to return to the years of his youth in “The Star-Wagon” (also 1937). Critic Wolcott Gibbs praised him in the New Yorker as “brilliant, impressive, heartbreaking, vibrant and eloquent.”