Early Acting Career
After the war, Doohan started his acting career. His work began with a CBC radio show appearance on January 12, 1946. He took a drama class in Toronto, and later won a two-year scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, where his classmates included Leslie Nielsen, Tony Randall and Richard Boone. For several years Doohan would shuttle between Toronto and New York as work demanded. During this period he appeared on some 4,000 radio programs and 400 television programs, and earned a reputation for his versatility.
In the mid-1950s he appeared as forest ranger Timber Tom (the northern counterpart of Buffalo Bob) in the Canadian version of Howdy Doody. Coincidentally, fellow Star Trek cast member William Shatner appeared simultaneously as Ranger Bill in the American version. Doohan and Shatner also appeared on the 1950s Canadian science fiction series Space Command.
Doohan played the lead role in the CBC TV drama production Flight into Danger written by Arthur Hailey who turned it into the novel Runway Zero-Eight, later adapted as Terror in the Sky. His credits also included The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Bewitched, Fantasy Island, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964) and Bonanza. In the Bonanza episode, "Gift of Water" (1962), he co-starred with actress Majel Barrett, who would later be cast in the role of Star Trek's Nurse Chapel. He appeared as an assistant to the United States president in two episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Read more about this topic: James Doohan
Famous quotes containing the words early, acting and/or career:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has “cast up” in my time or is like to—this art by which even the “poor” can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?”
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)