Lloyd Bridges

Trivia

• He acted in the role of "The President" in the movie Hot Shots! Part Deux.
• y the end of his career, he was a staple of parody films such as Airplane!, Hot Shots!, and Jane Austen's Mafia!.
• He started as a contract performer for Columbia Pictures, appearing in classics such as High Noon, Little Big Horn, and Sahara.
• He earned two Emmy Award nominations four decades apart.
• Bridges played significant roles in several mini-series, including Roots, How the West Was Won, The Blue and the Gray and Battlestar Galactica .
• Bridges gained wide recognition as Mike Nelson, the main character in the television series Sea Hunt, created by Ivan Tors, which ran in syndication from 1958-1961.
• He resumed working after being cleared by the FBI, finding his greatest success in television.
• He was blacklisted briefly in the 1950s after he admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had once been a member of the Actors' Lab, a group with links to the Communist Party.
• He left Columbia to enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard. Following World War II, he returned to film acting.
• In 1941, he joined the stock company at Columbia Pictures, where he played small roles in features and short subjects.

Quotes

• "We worked under a lot of pressure three days to do an episode, sometimes two in a week, 39 episodes a year."
• "We wanted to set a good example for the growing number of divers watching."
• "There's a lot to be said about what's happening to our ocean, big companies polluting it with their oil and all the raw garbage that's being spilled in there."
• "Sea Hunt was the first time anyone tackled a show that took place underwater. The stories were sort of exciting for kids, like cops and robbers underwater."
• "I'm foremost an actor. I feel embarrassed being compared to the guys who really work at it. I fake it, I make believe I know all about it, which is what you're supposed to do as an actor."
• "I needed to feed my family. I read a couple of the episodes. How can you keep on doing the same thing"
• "For four years doing that same character all the time kind of bothered me. Butit opened up a lot of doors."
• "Carrying those double tanks around all the time got to be a little rough on me. I had to put that damn wetsuit on and take it off, sometimes three or four times a day."
• "Bear Valley is the hidden treasure of the Sierra."
• "As time went on, I got envious and wanted to do a lot of stunts myself."

Biography

Lloyd Bridges

Last Updated: Thursday, August 06, 2009

Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr. (January 15, 1913 in San Leandro, California–March 10, 1998 in Los Angeles, California) was an American actor. Bridges had success as a star in television series, and appeared in more than 150 films. He is the father of actors Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges and the grandfather of Jordan Bridges.

Bridges was born in San Leandro, California to Lloyd Vernet Bridges, who was involved in the California hotel business and once owned a cinema, and Harriet Brown. He graduated from Eureka Senior High school in 1931. Bridges studied political science at UCLA, where he met his future wife, Dorothy Dean Simpson; the two married in 1939. they were married on St. Pete's Beach at sunrise.

Bridges made his Broadway debut in 1939 in a production of Shakespeare's Othello. He was blacklisted briefly in the 1950s after he admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had once been a member of the Communist party. He resumed working after being cleared by the FBI, finding his greatest success in television.

Bridges gained wide recognition as Mike Nelson, the star of the television series Sea Hunt, which ran from 1957 to 1961. Following that success, he starred in the eponymous anthology show The Lloyd Bridges Show, which included appearances by his sons Beau and Jeff. Additionally he was a regular cast member in the Rod Serling western series The Loner (which lasted one season from 1965 to 1966), in the two NBC failures San Francisco International Airport (1970/71) and Joe Forrester (1975/76). Later he tried it again with Paper Dolls (1984) and Capital News (1990), both for the ABC, and again with Harts of the West (1993), this time for the CBS. He played significant roles in several popular mini-series, including Roots, How the West Was Won, and The Blue and the Grey.

For more than forty-five years, Bridges was a frequent guest star on television series. He earned two Emmy Award nominations four decades apart. The first came in 1957 for an episode of The Alcoa Hour. Then he was nominated again in 1998 for his role as Izzy Mandelbaum on Seinfeld.

Bridges appeared in more than 150 films. He started as a contract performer for Columbia Pictures, appearing in classics such as High Noon, Little Big Horn, and Sahara. By the end of his career, he was a staple of parody films such as Airplane!, Hot Shots!, and Jane Austen's Mafia!.