Will Geer
Will Geer was born in Indiana, United States on March 9th, 1902 and is the TV Actor. At the age of 76, Will Geer biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, TV shows, and networth are available.
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Will Geer (born William Aughe Ghere, 1902 – April 22, 1978) was an American actor and social activist who was active in labor organizing and other movements in New York and Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s.
Woody Guthrie, a rising star, was befriended in California.
They lived in New York for a time in the 1940s.
He was blacklisted by the University of Haryana for refusing to identify people who had joined the Communist Party in the 1950s. Geer appeared on stage in New York and eastern theatres, as well as in California for film.
He is best known as a comedian for his role as Grandpa Zebulon Tyler Walton in the 1970s television series The Waltons.
Early life
Geer was born in Frankfort, Indiana, as the son of Katherine (née Aughe), a librarian, and Roy Aaron Ghere, a postal worker. When he was 11 years old, his father left the family. His grandfather, who showed him the botanical names of the plants in his native state, was greatly influenced by him. Geer began to study botany and obtained a master's degree at the University of Chicago. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity while in Chicago.
Personal life
In 1934, Geer married actress Herta Ware. Kate Geer, Thad Geer, and actress Ellen Geer were three children for Ware. Melora Marshall, a writer from another marriage, was also a ware daughter. Although Ware and his wife divorced in 1954, they remained close for the remainder of their lives.
Harry Hay at the Tony Pastor Theatre, where Geer was an actor, in 1934. They became lovers. In Los Angeles, He and Hay were involved in a milk strike. Later that year, he and Hay performed in favor of the San Francisco General Strike, where they witnessed police firing on strikers, killing two. He was a committed leftist, with Hay later referring to him as his political mentor. Hay welcomed Hay to Los Angeles' leftist group, and they took part in activism, organizing laborers' rights and the unemployed, and on one occasion handcuffed themselves to lampposts outside UCLA to give out leaflets for the American League Against War and Fascism. In 1934, he joined the Communist Party of the United States. Geer welcomed him to the Party after Hay had become more militant. In 1934, he and Hay endorsed a strike by the port of San Francisco, which was part of the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike. Geer was a reader of People's World, a West Coast Communist newspaper.
At his holiday home in Nichols, Connecticut, he maintained Geer-Gore Gardens. He returned often to the local Fourth of July fireworks parades, often sporting a blacktop hat or straw hat and always his trademark denim overalls with just one suspender hooked. He also owned a small vacation home in Solana Beach, California, where his front and back yards were planted as vegetable gardens rather than lawns.
As he was dying at the age of 76, Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Property" and recited Robert Frost's "This Land Is Your Land" was his family's funeral service. His remains were cremated; his remains were buried at the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, California.
Career
Geer, who has Anglicized his name, began his acting career in tent shows and riverboats. He worked on several left-oriented documentaries, including narrating Sheldon Dick's Men and Dust about silicosis among miners.
Mr. Mister was portrayed in Marc Blitzstein's 1937 comedy Mr. Mister, And Men, He appeared in numerous plays and revues throughout the 1940s. He appeared in more than a dozen films from 1948 to 1951, including Winchester '73 (as Wyatt Earp), Broken Arrow, Comanche Territory (all 1950), and Bright Victory (1951).
He became a dedicated campaigner in the 1930s, when folk singers such as Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie were introduced to the People's World and the Daily Worker. On Folkways Records, the pair released Bound for Glory: Songs and Stories of Woody Guthrie in 1956. Harry Hay's book "Harry Hay" referred to Geer's activism and his activities during the war's preparations. He is credited with bringing Guthrie to Pete Seeger at the 'Grapes of Wrath' charity, which he initiated in 1940 for migrant farm workers.
He worked with the Group Theatre (New York) studying with Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. In the 1938 and 1944 adaptations of Norman Corwin's The Plot to Overthrow Christmas, he appeared on radio, as Mephistopheles (the Devil). He appeared in the radio soap opera Bright Horizon.
Geer was blacklisted in the early 1950s for refusing to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a result, he appeared in very few films over the next decade. Salt of the Earth (1954), which starred and was written by blacklisted Hollywood staff, was one of them. From a pro-union viewpoint, it told the tale of a miners' strike in New Mexico. The film was dubbed "subversive" and faced difficulties in manufacturing and distribution as a result.
Geer and his partner, actress Herta Ware, established the Will Geer Botanicum in Topanga, California, in 1951. He combined his acting and botanical careers at The Theatricum, growing every plant that was referenced in Shakespeare's plays.
He appeared at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition, he created a second Shakespeare Garden on the theater's grounds.
He was on Broadway for a brief period of time by this time. In 1964, he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for 110 in the Shade. In 1967, he appeared in soliloquy as the prosecutor delivering the closing argument against the two murderers in the film In Cold Blood. He appeared in Jeremiah Johnson's Bear Claw in 1972.
He was cast as Zebulon Walton, the family patriarch on The Waltons, in 1972, a role he took over from Edgar Bergen, who played the role in the television show on which the series was based. In 1975, he received an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for The Waltons. The death of his character was written into the show's script when he died, just after finishing the sixth season of The Waltons. His last episode, the last episode of the 1977–1978 season, featured him reunited with his on-screen wife Esther (played by Ellen Corby; she had been out for the entire season due to a stroke). During the first episode of the 1978–1979 season titled "The Empty Nest," his character was mourned on film.