Television
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In 1957, Whitman, who frequently appeared as police officer Sgt. Walters on the television series Highway Patrol, was seriously considered for the role of "Bart Maverick" in the smash hit television series Maverick. The studio needed another Maverick to rotate as the series lead with James Garner. Garner, who had filmed seven episodes, closely resembled Whitman at the time, but Jack Kelly was chosen for the part.
A decade later, however, Whitman played heroic Marshal Jim Crown in the lavish western TV series Cimarron Strip for a single season. The show, which ran 90 minutes per episode, was highly regarded for its theme music, production values, and Whitman's performance. His principal costars were Jill Townsend as Dulcey Coopersmith, proprietor of the local inn, and Randy Boone, who played the photographer Francis Wilder.
Later Whitman portrayed Clark Kent's father Jonathan Kent on the popular TV series Superboy.
Whitman made over two hundred appearances in various movies and television shows over a half-century span between 1951 and 2000. One of his early roles came in 1957 in the syndicated military dramas, Harbor Command, a drama about the United States Coast Guard, and The Silent Service, based on true stories of the submarine service of the United States Navy. Whitman's last credited role was in The President's Man, released in 2000 and starring Chuck Norris. He had previously appeared with Norris in a two-part episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
He was also a guest on Murder, She Wrote appearing in four different episodes, "Hit, Run and Homicide" (1984), "Powder Keg" (1986), "Trouble in Eden" (1987), and "Incident in Lot 7" (1992). Whitman also appeared in an episode of the TV series Ghost Story ("The Concrete Captain," c. 1973). In "Blood Sweat and Cheers", Series 4, Episode 8 of The A Team, Whitman played Jack Harman, a friend of Hannibal Smith.
Read more about this topic: Stuart Whitman
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)