'John Joseph Patrick Ryan' (
December 30,
1920 –
January 21,
1998), best known by his
stage name 'Jack Lord', was an American
television,
film, and
Broadway actor. He was best known for his starring role as Steve McGarrett in the
American television program ''
Hawaii Five-O'' from 1968 to 1980. Lord also appeared in several classic
feature films, among them ''
Man of the West'' (1958) starring
Gary Cooper.
Early Years
Jack Lord was the son of Irish-American parents. His father, William Lawrence Ryan was a steamship company executive. He developed his equestrian skills on his mother's fruit farm in the Hudson River Valley. At the age of fifteen he started spending summers at sea and from the deck of cargo ships, painted and sketched the landscapes he encountered;
Africa,
Mediterranean,
China. Education:
John Adams High School in
Ozone Park, New York, Fort Trumbull
Merchant Marine Academy, then located in
New London, Connecticut, graduating as an
Ensign with a
Third Mates License.
On a football scholarship to
New York University he secured a degree in Fine Arts.
Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, and the
Actor's Studio. He spent the first year of WW2 with the War Department's Corps of Engineers building bridges in
Persia (modern day Iran/Iraq). He then returned to the Merchant Marine as an
able bodied seaman before enrolling in the deck officer course at Fort Trumbull. While making maritime training films he took to the idea of acting.
This is when he decided to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse, working first as a salesman for Horgan Ford then later as a Cadillac salesman in New York to fund his studies. Later, at the Actor's Studio, he studied with
Marlon Brando,
Paul Newman, and
Marilyn Monroe.
Career
His first work on Broadway was in, "Traveling Lady","Flame Out", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"; followed by his first in
Hollywood, "Court Martial of Billy Mitchell" with
Gary Cooper. Early in his career, he met his wife,
Marie, who gave up her own career to support him.
Lord was the first actor to play the
character of
Felix Leiter in the
James Bond film series, introduced in the first Bond film, ''
Dr. No''. One story alleges that the
film producers did not ask Lord to reprise the role in later films, since they felt that having the same actor playing Leiter would upstage the dominance of
Sean Connery as the leading man. There is another story that Lord demanded co-star billing, a bigger role and more money to reprise the Felix Leiter role in
Goldfinger (film) with
Guy Hamilton casting the role to an older actor to make Leiter more of an American 'M' than a friend to Bond.
In 1962, Lord starred as Stoney Burke, a rodeo cowboy from Mission Ridge, South Dakota, in the television series of that name.
In 1965, Jack Lord was considered for the role of
Captain Kirk on ''; the role ultimately went to
William Shatner. Because Lord wanted to co-produce and have a percentage in ownership of the series, he was ultimately rejected by both
Gene Roddenberry and
Desilu Studios.
The Artist
After ''Hawaii Five-O'', Lord concentrated on his painting and his work was well-renowned --- one of his paintings was formerly housed by New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art and his art has been housed in some 40 museums worldwide.
[1]
Death
Jack Lord died of
congestive heart failure at his home on
January 21,
1998 in
Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of 77. Lord left an estate of $40 million, and being a philanthropist in his lifetime, the entire estate went to various Hawaiian charities upon his wife Marie's death in 2005.
[2]
Portions of their estate were auctioned on eBay in
March 2007.
Trivia
★ Jack Lord's television debut was on the
April 11,
1954 telecast of "Follow That Man" in an episode entitled "The Chinese Dolls." The series has never been aired on network television since it went off the air in 1956, but is available commercially on
DVD. This very episode is also scheduled for a public film showing at the
Mid atlantic nostalgia convention in Aberdeen,
Maryland in
September 2007.
★ The producers of the 2000
Norm MacDonald comedy ''
Screwed'' paid homage to Lord by making
Danny DeVito's character Grover the
zealous vice-president of the "Jack Lord Fan Club". The film's focus on this topic included scenes from ''Hawaii Five-O'' being watched (and spoken word for word) by Grover.
★
Traci Lords derived her stage name from the last name of her favorite actor.
★ Jack Lord also appears in the lead role of ''John Frye'' in the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's movie ''Story of a Patriot''
★ Game show host
Richard Dawson made fun of Jack Lord on the first episode of
Family Feud when it debuted in 1976. His first line was "I haven't been this excited since I got the oil drilling rights to Jack Lord's hair!"
★ Originally, he wanted to be billed "Jack Ryan," but another actor had already registered that name with Actor's Equity. He wanted a short name that would fit on a movie marquee, so he became "Jack Lord" instead.
★ A dedicated liberal activist, he was a vocal advocate of gun control in the United States, though he used guns in nearly every performance.
★ Dubbed "the Lord" (behind his back) by the cast and crew of
Hawaii Five-O because of his imperious manner.
★ He was known for being a very cultured man who loved reading poetry out loud on the set of his TV show and as being somewhat reclusive at his
Honolulu home.
★ Lord met his son (from his first marriage), only once when the boy was an infant; his son was later killed in an accident at the age of thirteen.
★ In an interview for the May 1970 issue of Photoplay, he talks about his Irish-American background, referring to his father Lawrence Ryan as "big and tough and Irish" and his mother, Josephine O'Brien as an "Irish matriarch".
★ In his final years, suffered from
Alzheimer's disease.
[3]
References
1. [1]
2. [2]
3. [3]
External links
★
The Jack Lord Photo Gallery
★ http://www.jacklordpersonalmemorabilia.com/
★
★
Photographs of several Jack Lord paintings at the
M&E Five-O Page
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