Pat O'Brien

Pat O'Brien, the warm-voiced actor known to moviegoers as "Hollywood's Irishman in Residence," who played priests, coaches, cops and reporters in more than a hundred films, died in Santa Monica, California, on October 15, 1983. He was eighty-three. He was born William Joseph Patrick O'Brien on November 11, 1899, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to an Irish-American Catholic family whose four grandparents had all come from Ireland. He served as an altar boy at Gesu Church and attended Marquette Academy, where he began a lifelong friendship with Spencer Tracy. The two joined the Navy together during the First World War and trained at Great Lakes, though the war ended before they went to sea. He took up acting in New York and worked his way through stock companies and Broadway. His film break came in 1931, when he played the reporter Hildy Johnson in the first screen version of The Front Page. At Warner Bros. he became one of the busiest actors of the 1930s, often paired with his close friend James Cagney in pictures such as Here Comes the Navy, Ceiling Zero and Angels with Dirty Faces, in which he played the priest Father Jerry Connolly opposite Cagney's doomed gangster. His best-remembered role came in 1940 as the Notre Dame football coach in Knute Rockne, All American, with a young Ronald Reagan as George Gipp. He also played the chaplain Father Duffy in The Fighting 69th that year. Later generations knew him as the dogged detective Mulligan in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot in 1959. He worked steadily in television and on stage, and in 1981 he appeared with Cagney once more in Ragtime. He married Eloise Taylor in 1931, and their marriage lasted more than half a century. He died of a heart attack after minor surgery. President Reagan, who had telephoned him at the hospital days earlier, issued a statement mourning his old friend. O'Brien is remembered for a screen decency that made his characters, whether priest or policeman, people audiences wanted to trust.