Beloved gay actor Earl Holliman of 'Police Woman,' 'Twilight Zone' fame dies at 96

Earl Holliman, an actor with dozens of TV and movie credits, including the first episode of The Twilight Zone and an important supporting role on Police Woman, has died at age 96.

Holliman died Monday at his home in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, where he had been receiving hospice care, his husband, Craig Curtis, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Holliman was born into an impoverished family in Louisiana in 1928. His father died several months before he was born, so his birth mother had to give up seven of her 10 children, and he was adopted as an infant by Henry Earl Holliman and Velma Holliman, an oil-field worker and a waitress, respectively, according to the Internet Movie Database.

“I had wonderful parents who gave me all the love in the world,” Earl Holliman once said of the couple who adopted him, the Reporter notes. “They encouraged me to be whatever I can be. I was their only child.”

While in the Navy in the 1940s, Holliman appeared in theater productions put on by service members, and later he studied acting at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Pasadena Playhouse. He broke into movies by sneaking on to the Paramount lot and meeting a producer, Varietyreports.

He acted in numerous major films in the 1950s and ’60s, including Giant, with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean; Broken Lance, playing one of the sons of rancher Spencer Tracy; Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; Forbidden Planet, a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in outer space; The Sons of Katie Elder, with John Wayne and Dean Martin; and The Rainmaker, starring Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. He won a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actor for The Rainmaker, playing Hepburn’s amorous younger brother — a role for which he beat out Elvis Presley.

Eventually, he worked primarily — and steadily — in television. He starred in the first episode of the science fiction anthology series The Twilight Zone, portraying a man inhabiting what seems to be a deserted world in “Where Is Everybody?,” which aired in 1959. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling praised his work in a letter Curtis read to Variety: “Your performance was outstanding, full of dimension, shading and a fantastic believability. In short, Holliman, you’re one hell of an actor!”

He had guest roles in many TV series, including The Fugitive, Gunsmoke, The F.B.I., The Streets of San Francisco, and Murder, She Wrote, and appeared in the 1983 miniseries The Thorn Birds, which starred Richard Chamberlain, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rachel Ward. He had his best-known role on Police Woman, playing Lt. Bill Crowley, the boss of Los Angeles undercover officer Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson, portrayed by Angie Dickinson. The series ran from 1974 to 1978.

On the show, “She’d get into trouble and I’d run in and save her,” Holliman said in a 2003 interview, according to the Reporter. “I would make some smart remark and she would come back at me in some sexy kind of way, and a lot of that was ad-libbed. We had a tacit kind of permission to do that.”

In his later years, “he continued to respond to autograph requests and share anecdotes of his meetings with stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor,” Variety notes.

He ran the Fiesta Dinner Playhouse in San Antonio for a several years and acted onstage there and elsewhere, appearing in plays including Mister Roberts, Arsenic and Old Lace, A Chorus Line, and A Streetcar Named Desire. He played the lead role of Curly in a tour of the musical Oklahoma! in 1963 as well, according to IMDB, and sang on albums for Capitol Records.

Although his politics were largely conservative, he was an animal rights activist. He was president of Actors and Others for Animals for 34 years and joined Dian Fossey in her effort to save mountain gorillas in Africa. He once said “going up the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda with Dian to help raise awareness for the plight of her gorillas” was one of the proudest times of his life, Variety reports.

Holliman was “a gracious, kind confidant, a consummate host, a man whose indefatigable positivity was evergreen and powered by a 1,000-watt smile, an easy charm and infectious goodwill,” Curtis told Variety. “A joy and a privilege to spend time with, he was even-keeled and compassionate, possessing a deep sensitivity and mischievous sense of humor which were belied by his stoically handsome countenance.”