Dean Jagger — “Roots are Important” (1951) 🇺🇸
Dean Jagger, Academy Award winner, has his own philosophy of acting aside the part that he can play in the industry.
Ever since I learned that Dean Jagger paid his own expenses back to Hollywood from New York to test for the role in 20th-Century-Fox’s picture Twelve O’Clock High, which is decidedly uncommon in the ranks of top ranking character players, I’ve had a hankering to put the simple question of “Why?”, to him. I got my chance the other day between a break in the shooting of My Son, John, in which he is playing opposite Helen Hayes.
Armed with a few interesting facts about Jagger’s background, I felt that I knew the answer but wanted to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. That’s exactly what I got, as basic an interview as this correspondent has ever had.
“Well, Paul,” said Dean, “I reckon that the reason I was so eager to do that part in Twelve O’Clock High was that I knew it was right for me.” When Darryl Zanuck [Darryl F. Zanuck] learned that Jagger was willing to pay his own way back to the west coast to test for the role, he said, “If Jagger is so anxious to do this role, let him have it without a test!” But this was no go with Jagger. “Testing will prove whether my hunch is right. The role is too good to ruin with the wrong actor doing the part. I insist in testing for the part.” So test they did, even though Zanuck knew that it was merely a waste of money. He was sure that Jagger was perfect for the role.
Later, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added their opinion in the more solid and glittering form of an Oscar when they awarded Jagger the coveted kudo for this magnificent performance.
Jagger was born on a small farm in Ohio, and his first chores were typical of the young American farm boy. During those early days, the life of the farmer and his family was pretty rugged, with modern methods of conserving the soil a long, long way off. It meant unending hours of tilling, sowing, caring, worrying, and the final harvest, no dynamic processes for these people of the soil in those days. Jagger leaned to his task like a real Jagger, a proud name in those parts.
“The root was the thing,” explained Jagger. “The root is the most important item of anything anyone will ever undertake to do. My folks taught that to me, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
“But Dean,” I replied, “here in the theatre you’re a long ways off from the roots and the soil. How does this rule apply to your present career?”
“Simple as ABC,” he drawled, with a grinny smile. This ABC routine was a natural phrase from a man who taught a rural school comprised of eight grades at the age of 16.
He continued, “You see, Paul, acting is no different from planting a seed in the ground. The seed or germ of the idea was born in someone’s mind, and, through care and hard work, developed into a blooming plant. In the case of a painting, a novel, invention of a mechanical device, or a million and one other things, this is the end of the season, the harvest has been completed. But in the matter of a play or a motion picture, this first seed is, as the famous Captain Henry, of the Showboat radio show, used to exclaim: ‘It’s only the beginning folks, only the beginning!’
“And he was never more right.
“Now comes the task of assigning the right actors to their proper parts. These people are simply new soil in which to transplant the same seed of inspiration. If someone has chosen unwisely, the entire crop can be ruined. And in some real producers of the theatre is the sensitive knowledge to detect the wheat from the chaff. To me it has always been important to ‘feel’ the part before I even allow myself to get interested in it. Once I get the feel, that this was for me, that I could reap a harvest for the show, in my small part, I went after the role like a tiger.”
This tiger of the stage and screen stretches a cool six feet, two inches in height, and tips the scales at a muscular 198 pounds. At 16 he was already six feet tall. He was bitten with the stage bug through his love of poetry. Hitchhiking to Chicago, he studied dramatics under the tutelage of Elias Day, a top monologist. In those days, the barnstorming stock companies called for each member of the small cast to double in brass, playing sometimes as many as four different roles during the performance of a single play. Jagger learned fast and well.
After a few years of this, he, as many others before him, went to New York, mecca of the theatre world. Success was no spontaneous event, and it was a grim road right from the first day he set his foot on teeming Broadway. The road finally led to such important impressarios as George M. Cohan, Henry Duffy, Marc Connelly, The Theatre Guild, George Abbott, and many others.
After several Hollywood starts he hit the jackpot with his startling characterization of Brigham Young in the 20th-Fox film of the same name. Since this stellar performance, any number of roles have been eagerly laid in his lap, but the farm boy in him told him to turn down most of them as they were “just not the seed for my soil.”
Today, with such outstanding performances to his credit as Twelve O’Clock High and Rawhide, it would seem apparent to the student of the theatre that Dean Jagger had followed his road well indeed. And to all who read this it might also be well to remain for a moment with his thought, “It’s the root of things which are important, in all things!”
Thanks, Dean Jagger, for a great visit. — P. M.
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Wanda Hendrix is tense in an important dramatic scene with Jagger in U-l’s Sierra, in Technicolor.
Collection: Exhibitor Magazine (Studio Survey), April 1951