Earl Holliman, the actor best known for playing Angie Dickinson\u2019s boss on the 1970s NBC cop drama Police Woman, has died. He was 96. Holliman died Monday in hospice care at his home in Studio City, his spouse, Craig Curtis, told The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n
Holliman won a best supporting actor Golden Globe for portraying Katharine Hepburn\u2019s girl-crazy kid brother in The Rainmaker (1956) \u2014 he beat out Elvis Presley for the role \u2014 and then appeared in another Burt Lancaster film, as Wyatt Earp\u2019s assistant in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957).<\/p>\n
In the George Stevens epic Giant (1956), the Louisiana native played the son-in-law of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson\u2019s characters, was the cook in Forbidden Planet (1956) and appeared as the brother of John Wayne, Dean Martin and Michael Anderson Jr. in Henry Hathaway\u2019s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).<\/p>\n
Holliman also portrayed a man with amnesia in a deserted town on the very first episode of Rod Serling\u2019s The Twilight Zone, \u201cWhere Is Everybody?\u201d which premiered on Oct. 2, 1959.
\nAlso during the 1959-60 TV season, Holliman starred as Sundance, a Colorado gunslinger-turned-marshal with a sidekick \u2014 a dog named Useless \u2014 on the short-lived Hotel de Paree.<\/p>\n
Three years later, Holliman toplined another TV Western, NBC\u2019s Wide Country; he played a rodeo star on that Ralph Edwards-produced series, but that lasted only a season as well.<\/p>\n
Holliman replaced Bert Convy after the pilot to star as the macho Lt. Bill Crowley on Police Woman, which aired from 1974-78. He shared a pleasant chemistry with Dickinson, who starred as LAPD undercover cop Sgt. Suzanne \u201cPepper\u201d Anderson, on the series\u2019 four seasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019d get into trouble and I\u2019d run in and save her,\u201d Holliman, talking about a typical Police Woman storyline, said in a 2003 interview. \u201cI would make some smart remark and she would come back at me in some sexy kind of way, and a lot of that was ad-libbed. We had a tacit kind of permission to do that.\u201d
\nHenry Earl Holliman was born on Sept. 11, 1928, in Delhi, Louisiana. His natural father died six months before he was born, and Holliman was placed in an orphanage before being adopted when he was a week old.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen [his adoptive parents] came to see me, I was sick and they took me right away to the doctor, who apparently said, \u2018You don\u2019t have a baby here, you have a funeral expense,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThey paid the midwife $7.50 for me \u2014 this was in the backwoods of Louisiana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earl Holliman, the actor best known for playing Angie Dickinson\u2019s boss on the 1970s NBC cop drama Police Woman, has died. He was 96. Holliman died Monday in hospice care at his home in Studio City, his spouse, Craig Curtis, told The Hollywood Reporter. Holliman won a best supporting actor Golden Globe for portraying Katharine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memorial"],"yoast_head":"\n