Success and Decline
In 1955, Young became the host of Warner Bros. Presents, an umbrella title for three television series (Casablanca, King's Row, and Cheyenne) that aired during the 1955-56 season on ABC Television. Later, he starred on the 1964-65 NBC series The Rogues, sharing appearances on a rotating basis with David Niven and Charles Boyer in the Four Star Television production.
Young won the Academy Award for his role as Rocky, the dance marathon emcee and promoter in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They? According to his fourth wife, Elaine Williams, "What he was aching for, as he walked up to collect his Oscar, was a role in his own movie—one that they could finally call 'a Gig Young movie.' For Young, the Oscar was literally the kiss of death, the end of the line". Young himself had said to Louella Parsons, after failing to win in 1951, "so many people who have been nominated for an Oscar have had bad luck afterwards."
Young also is remembered by many James Dean fans for the "driving safety" interview made shortly before Dean's death in September, 1955.
Alcoholism plagued his later years, causing him to lose acting roles. He was fired on the first day of shooting the comedy film Blazing Saddles after collapsing on the set due to withdrawals from alcohol. Young's last role was in the 1978 film Game of Death (1979), a film released nearly six years after the film's star, Bruce Lee, died in 1973.
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Famous quotes containing the words success and, success and/or decline:
“Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“I was elected a Captain of Volunteers—a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)