Career Summary:
Supporting Actor: 2 nominations, 1 Oscar, for Stagecoah
Age at winning: 47
Age at death: 70
Cumulative Advantage: Oscar, Tony, Emmy
Thomas John Mitchell (July 11, 1892 – December 17, 1962) was a versatile American actor, boasting a long, lucrative career on stage, film, and TV.
Mitchell has the distinction of being the first member of the Triple Crown of Acting, having won the Oscar, the Emmy, and the Tony Awards.
Note:
If you want to know more about the Oscars, please rad my book:
Mitchell was nominated twice for the Best Supporting Actor: the first time for John Ford’s The Hurricane in 1937, and the second, two years later, also in John Ford movie, the Western Stagecoach, in which he played the alcoholic Doc Boone.
The year of 1939 must have been the best in his career: In addition to Stagecoach, he also played his best known role, Gerald O’Hara, Scarlett’s father in the Best Picture winner, Gone With the Wind.
He is also well remembered for playing Uncle Billy in Frank Capra’s masterpiece, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mayor Jonas Henderson in Fred Zinnemann‘s Oscar-winning Western, High Noon, opposite Gary Cooper.
Later on, Mitchell was nominated three times for the Emmy Award. He was nominated twice, in 1952 and 1953, for his role in the medical drama The Doctor, winning the Lead Actor Drama award in 1953.
Nominated again in 1955, for an appearance on a weekly anthology series, he did not win.
Mitchell won the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical, in 1953, for his role as Dr. Downer in the musical comedy Hazel Flagg, based on the 1937 Paramount comedy, Nothing Sacred, thus rounding out the Triple Crown of Acting.
In addition to being an actor, he was also a director, playwright and screenwriter.