Vince Edwards

Vince Edwards
Role:	Director
BSG Universe:	Original Series and Galactica 1980
Date of Birth:	July 9, 1928
Date of Death:	March 11, 1996
Age at Death:	67
Nationality:	USA
[ Official Site]
IMDb profile

Vince Edwards (July 9, 1928—March 11, 1996) was an American director and actor who directed four episodes of the Original Series and Galactica 1980, namely the two-parters "The Living Legend" and "The Super Scouts" respectively, and is best known for starring as the title character of the medical drama series Ben Casey (1961–1966).

Career

Born Vincent Edward Zoino, a name Edwards confirmed in his own words in a syndicated 1962 newspaper column, in which he wrote that he had chosen the stage name "Vince Edwards" partly to spare his mother, who had never been exposed to show business, any embarrassment over his birth surname, Edwards trained as a competitive swimmer in high school and won an athletic scholarship to Ohio State University, where he was part of a team that won a national swimming championship; an appendicitis operation ended his hopes of competing in the Olympics and redirected him toward acting. He also studied at the University of Hawaii and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, made his Broadway debut in the chorus of High Button Shoes in 1947, and around this time became friends with actor Nick Dennis, who introduced him to Marlon Brando, then appearing with Dennis in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He signed a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1951, the same year he made his film debut in Mister Universe. Through the 1950s he took supporting and lead roles in a series of B-pictures and film noirs; he is best remembered from the period for The Killing (1956) and Murder by Contract (1958). Looking back in 1962, Edwards described the years before his breakthrough as "pounding away at the Door of Opportunity for some 12 years" before it finally opened.

Edwards reached the peak of his career as the title character of Ben Casey, an ABC medical drama that ran from 1961 to 1966 and made him a television star; he was discovered for the role by entertainer Bing Crosby, whose production company made the series. Sources disagree on how many episodes of the series he directed himself; figures range from seven to a dozen to roughly 20 of the show's 154 episodes, his first regular directing work (see Notes); he used the series' popularity to launch a recording career, releasing six albums. In a 1988 Associated Press interview, Edwards recalled the suddenness of his rise to fame, saying simply, "I went from obscurity to fame." Writing in his 1962 newspaper column after the show's first season, Edwards noted that columnists and magazine writers had already begun applying adjectives such as surly, moody, sullen, irascible, explosive, and testy to his interpretation of Casey, adjectives he allowed might be apt given how the character's moods shifted with the script and a given episode's director.

Even while Ben Casey was still airing, Edwards worked to build a parallel film career as insurance against the series ending; by late 1963 he had completed the war picture The Victors and outlined a plan to make one major theatrical feature a year for the next five years. He contrasted his brooding on-screen image with his actual temperament, describing himself in the same interview as a smiling, easygoing bachelor who would rather throw darts than wield a scalpel, and pointed to Jim Garner and Steve McQueen as examples of television leads who had successfully shed the typecasting of Maverick and Wanted: Dead or Alive. "If I'm a good enough actor," he said, "people will eventually forget that I played Ben Casey."

After Ben Casey ended, Edwards found his post-Casey career hampered by the role's typecasting, much as he had anticipated. His film work in the immediate aftermath included the 1968 war picture The Devil's Brigade, for which he spent fourteen weeks on location in Utah, and Hammerhead, also released in 1968 and filmed on location in Lisbon, Portugal, where in October 1967 he was hospitalized for several days after slipping and breaking a bone in his heel. His one further regular series, Matt Lincoln (1970–71), in which he played a psychiatrist running an inner-city telephone counseling line for troubled teenagers, lasted a single season. His other television-movie roles of the period included Cover Girls, The Courage and the Passion, and Firehouse.

Edwards continued to direct for television from the 1970s into the early 1990s, with single episodes of Police Story (1976), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and David Cassidy—Man Undercover (both 1978), B.J. and the Bear (the December 1979 episode "Silent Night, Unholy Night"), Fantasy Island, The Fall Guy (1982), and In the Heat of the Night (the 1990 episode "Indiscretions"), in addition to his episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980, detailed below.

He wrote and directed the 1973 telefilm Maneater, co-writing the script with Marcus Demian and Jimmy Sangster. It premiered December 8, 1973, as part of ABC's "Movie of the Week" anthology (see Notes), and was Edwards' first directing assignment on a TV movie, following his episodic Ben Casey work in the mid-1960s. He also directed, and with Christian I. Nyby II co-wrote, Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979), a theatrical feature assembled from "The Living Legend" and roughly fifteen minutes of "Fire in Space" for release outside the United States.

Edwards also provided voice work for two Ruby-Spears animated series, voicing Jake Rockwell across all 65 episodes of Centurions (1986) and contributing additional voices to 13 episodes of It's Punky Brewster (1985). In 1986 he co-starred as FBI Agent Frank Walker in the TV movie The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. In 1988 he returned to his signature role in the syndicated TV movie The Return of Ben Casey, in which the character was depicted as having served as a surgeon in Vietnam and having since married and divorced. He made his final film, The Fear, in 1995.

Edwards died of pancreatic cancer on March 11, 1996, at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where, according to his manager, T.J. Castromovo, he had been hospitalized for about 10 days. He lived in the coastal suburb of Marina Del Rey at the time of his death. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California (Section CC, Tier 64, Grave 29).

Direction on Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980

In 1978, the same year he directed the two-part "The Living Legend" on Battlestar Galactica, Edwards also directed a third-season episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries for executive producer Glen A. Larson; two years later he directed the two-part "The Super Scouts" on Galactica 1980, also produced by Larson.

Story editors Allan Cole and Chris Bunch later recalled friction with Edwards' directing approach during production of "The Super Scouts, Part I." When the two were sent to cut scene setups from an overlong script, Edwards objected that doing so would undermine the cast's motivation; Lorne Greene made use of his clout to cut and trim scenes for the episode, saving the production crew time from setups that would have otherwise protracted shooting. During the bridge-explosion sequence from Delphi's bridge, Cole recalled that Edwards directed the cast to evacuate a burning set at a deliberately unhurried pace, drawing an angry reaction from Glen Larson in the dailies, and that a falling prop beam, triggered late on cue, narrowly missed Edwards himself. Cole was more pointed elsewhere in the same interview, writing that Edwards "blew a million dollar special effect" during the production and nearly injured himself in the process.

Cole has described Galactica 1980 as the most expensive series then airing on American television, costing $1.2 million to $1.5 million to produce per episode against an ABC license fee of only $600,000 to $700,000, with Universal absorbing the remainder. He identified the $1.5 million figure, the highest he cited for any single episode of the series, specifically with "The Super Scouts, Part I," calling it "the most ever spent for a TV episode at that time." Cole has linked the series' cancellation to this mounting budget overrun combined with a steady ratings decline over the course of its run, recalling that by the time of the series finale the production was "flat out of dough" and the staff "knew the series was going to be killed." Cole pointed to numerous other contributing factors as well, including disputes with network censors, constant on-set script rewrites, and an unusually large number of credited producers, so the blown effect on Edwards' episode is best understood as one specific, costly instance within that broader pattern rather than a sole cause.

Director credits for "Battlestar Galactica"

• The Original Series
  • "The Living Legend", Part I and Part II
• Galactica 1980
  • "The Super Scouts", Part I and Part II
• Theatrical compilations
  • Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979), assembled from "The Living Legend" and footage from "Fire in Space"; co-directed with Christian I. Nyby II

See also: Episodes directed by Vince Edwards

Personal life

Edwards married four times. His first marriage, to actress Kathy Kersh, lasted from June 13 to October 1965 and produced one daughter. That daughter, born about January 1966, is named "Devara" in contemporary press accounts (see Notes for a spelling variant). In March 1967 Edwards sought to have Kersh held in contempt of court, stating in a filing that she had made it inconvenient for him to exercise his court-ordered visitation rights; he won the right to see their daughter twice weekly following a hearing. Edwards' filing quoted Kersh's response to his visit request as, "I have made other plans. The world does not revolve around you." Kersh later married actor Burt Ward, who played Robin in the 1960s Batman television series.

He next married actress Linda Ann Foster, a British-born performer who had emigrated to the United States from Lancaster, England, in 1960. They wed August 6, 1967, at the Beverly Hills home of singer Dean Martin, where the couple had met the previous year. His UPI obituary names her instead as "actress Linda Winters." The marriage produced two daughters, Angela and Nicole; Foster filed for divorce in August 1972, ending what newspapers at the time described as a five-year marriage (see Notes for a discrepancy with IMDb's database). Despite the filing, the couple's spokesman said Foster still planned to accompany Edwards to a planned visit with President Nixon at the Western White House in San Clemente the following week, as the Edwardses were among several celebrities invited. He then married actress Cassandra Edwards, from December 6, 1980, until their divorce. His fourth and final marriage, to Janet Friedman, began November 7, 1994, and lasted until his death sixteen months later.

At the time of his death he was survived by his widow, Janet Edwards, his brother Bob Zoino, and three daughters from his earlier marriages: Angela, Nicole, and Devera Allene. Angela, 26, and Nicole, 27, visited him shortly before he died. Nicole Nadolenco, his daughter by his second wife, worked for Emmy Awards producer Al Schwartz at the time and was involved in preparing a memorial tribute to her father for the 1996 Primetime Emmy Awards broadcast. Janet Edwards said she only learned of the planned tribute after being contacted by a member of Dick Clark's production staff, and that her own request for a ticket to attend was turned down on the grounds of cost and a sold-out venue.

In his later years, Edwards battled a compulsive gambling addiction. His longtime friend, director William Friedkin, who had directed Edwards in 1987's Deal of the Century and in a television film for cable, said after Edwards' death that he had "sacrificed a good portion of his career to an addiction." Following his death, his widow Janet was completing his memoir, Easy, the Hard Way—The Reel to Real Story, which was to recount how she had once taken him to court over gambling debts during their four-year courtship and married him immediately after winning the case; literary agent Mike Hamilburg was handling the book deal, and producer Herman Rush had expressed interest in adapting it as a film.

Notes

• Sources disagree on Edwards' exact birth date and birth name. His UPI obituary and IMDb's biography page give July 9, 1928, and the name Vincent Edward Zoino, which IMDb's database records more fully as "Vincent Edward Zoino Jr." An obituary index compiled by Newcastle University's School of Computing Science instead gives July 7, 1928, and the name "Vincente Eduardo Zoino."
• Sources also disagree on how many Ben Casey episodes Edwards directed: IMDb's director filmography credits him with seven, the Washington Post's 1996 obituary states a dozen, and a Rotten Tomatoes biography puts the figure at roughly 20 of the series' 154 episodes.
• Several widely recirculated studio biographies describe Maneater (1973) as a CBS telefilm. Contemporary listings indicate it premiered on ABC's "Movie of the Week" anthology on December 8, 1973; it was rerun in CBS's syndicated late-movie slot in 1975 and 1977, which may account for the discrepancy.
• Edwards' daughter by Kathy Kersh is spelled "Devara" in contemporary 1967 newspaper coverage of the couple's custody dispute and "Devera Allene" in IMDb's database.
• Contemporary 1972 newspaper coverage of Linda Foster's divorce filing describes the marriage as having lasted five years (1967–1972), while IMDb's database gives the marriage's end date as 1979. This article follows the contemporaneous press account in the body text above.

References