Dana Andrews

Born Carver Dana Andrews in Collins, Mississippi, one of many children of a Baptist minister, he grew up in Texas, worked as an accountant and a gas-station attendant, and drove west with a dream of singing opera. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and paid long dues before films noticed him, which lent his work a certain hard-won, adult restraint from the start.

Andrews was not a flamboyant actor; his gift was for holding emotion in check until it burned. That banked intensity made him ideal for the disillusioned modern man. He was the lynching victim of the pitiless The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and then the obsessed detective falling in love with a portrait of a supposedly dead woman in Laura (1944), a role that fixed him as one of noir's essential faces. He returned to that shadowed world in Fallen Angel and the brutal Where the Sidewalk Ends.

His most important performance came in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as Fred Derry, the decorated bombardier who comes home to no job, a failing marriage, and a country that has moved on. His scene wandering through a field of mothballed warplanes, reliving the war, remains one of the quietly shattering moments in American cinema, and it spoke for a whole generation of returning servicemen.

Off-screen, Andrews battled alcoholism for years, a struggle he eventually confronted and then, with real courage, spoke about publicly, becoming an advocate for treatment at a time when such candor was rare. His stardom faded through the 1950s into television and lesser films, and his final years were clouded by Alzheimer's disease. He died at eighty-three. Never a showy star, he is increasingly valued as one of the truest and most modern of Golden Age actors, a master of the eloquence of what a man will not say.