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Wally Cox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wallace Maynard Cox (December 6, 1924 – February 15, 1973) was a television and motion picture actor.
He was born in Detroit, Michigan. He moved with his divorced mother, mystery author Eleanor Atkinson and a younger sister to Evanston, Illinois, when he was about 10, where he met and became close friends with another neighborhood child, Marlon Brando. Cox's family moved fairly frequently, eventually to Chicago, then New York City, then back to Detroit where he finished high school.
During the war years he and his family returned to New York City, where Cox attended CCNY, had four months of Army service, and then attended New York University. He supported his invalid mother and sister by making and selling jewelry, in a small shop, and at parties — where he started doing comedy monologues for the guests, which were well-received enough to lead to regular performances at nightclubs such as the Village Vanguard, beginning in December of 1948. At one point, he became the roommate of his boyhood friend, Marlon Brando. Brando encouraged him to study acting with Stella Adler. Cox and Brando remained very close friends for the rest of Cox's life, and Brando is reported [1] to have kept Cox's ashes in his bedroom and conversed with them nightly.
Cox appeared in Broadway musical reviews, night clubs, and early TV comedy-variety programs in the period 1949–1951, creating a huge impact with a starring role as a well-meaning but ineffective policeman on Philco Television Playhouse in 1951. Producer Fred Coe approached Cox about a starring role in a proposed live TV sitcom, Mr. Peepers, which he accepted. Peepers ran on NBC for three years and made Cox a household name in the US.
Other notable roles were as the eponymous hero of The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (1956-1957); regular occupant of the upper left square on the television game show Hollywood Squares (1966-1973); and voice of the animated cartoon character Underdog (1964-1973). He also guested on the game show What's My Line and on the pilot of Mission: Impossible (1966).
He played character roles in more than 20 motion pictures and worked frequently in guest-star roles in a large number of TV drama, comedy and variety series in the 1960s and early 1970s. Among these was a role as a down-on-his-luck prospector seeking a better life for his family in an episode of Alias Smith and Jones, the western comedy. His television and screen persona was that of a shy, timid but kind man who wore thick eyeglasses and spoke in a pedantic, high-pitched voice.
Cox published a number of books, including Mr. Peepers (1955), a novel created by adapting several scripts for the TV series; My Life as a Small Boy, an idealized depiction of his childhood (1961); a parody and update of Horatio Alger in Ralph Makes Good (1966), which was probably originally a screen treatment for an unmade film intended to star Cox; and a children's book, The Tenth Life of Osiris Oakes (1972). Cox also wrote and performed songs, and even had a yodeling routine.
Cox protested in vain to reporters and interviewers over the years that he was nothing like Peepers; he was physically quite strong, hiked and rode a motorcycle and especially in his later years sometimes displayed a sarcastic and peevish personality.
Cox died of a heart attack apparently brought on by a sleeping pill overdose, in Los Angeles at the age of 48. Eventually his ashes were mingled with those of Brando and another friend and scattered in Death Valley, California.