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| Portrays: | Commander Cain | ||||
| Date of Birth: | January 15, 1913 | ||||
| Date of Death: | March 10, 1998 | ||||
| Age at Death: | 85 | ||||
| Nationality: |  USA
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Early Life and Film Career
Lloyd Bridges, (born January 15, 1913 in San Leandro, California, died March 10, 1998 in Los Angeles, California) was an American film and TV actor.
Bridges debuted on Broadway in a stage production of Shakespeare's Othello in 1937. His film career began in 1940 when he was signed by Columbia Pictures to their stock company, working at $75 per week. He mostly had just bit parts at Columbia saying in a 1989 interview:
"I didn't have enough maturity for a leading man. I looked too broad in the shoulders ... too much like a kid. I never could get into (Columbia studio boss) Harry Cohn's office. All the best roles went to Glenn Ford and William Holden. They just put me in these awful B-pictures, like Two Latins from Manhattan. I even did a Three Stooges short. Sometimes I'd be in two or three movies a week. It was tough sledding."
He served in the Coast Guard during World War II and resumed his acting career, though he was briefly blacklisted in the early 1950s after he admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had once been a member of the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, a group found to have had links to the Communist party. He returned to acting after recanting his membership and serving as a cooperative witness. This coincided with an increasingly successful entry to television as well as supporting parts in movies like High Noon with Gary Cooper and Plymouth Adventure with Spencer Tracy.
Television Stardom
Television stardom came to Bridges when he starred as Mike Hunt in the underwater adventure series Sea Hunt, which ran from 1958 to 1961. Bridges would star in four additional television series in his career, The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962-1963), the post-Civil War western The Loner (1965-1966), created by Rod Serling, the 1975-76 police drama Joe Forrester and finally the short-lived newspaper drama Capital News (1990). Bridges was also among those considered for the role of Captain Kirk on Star Trek and was Gene Roddenberry's initial choice for the proposed "Assignment Earth" pilot spin-off from Trek.
The 1970s would see Bridges star in a number of television movies along with the award-winning miniseries Roots.
Comedic Renaissance
1980 saw Bridges reveal his comedic side in the disaster parody Airplane! as neurotic air-traffic controller Steve McCroskey. He reprised the role in Airplane II: The Sequel and showed his comic skills again in Hot Shots! (1991) and it's sequel Hot Shots! Part Deux. (1992)
Galactica
Bridges played the bombastic but brillant Commander Cain, commander of the presumed-lost battlestar Pegasus in the Original Series two-part episode, "The Living Legend".
Personal Life and Death
His sons Beau Bridges and Jeff Bridges became successful actors in their own right. Bridges died of natural causes at the age of 85 on March 10, 1998.