Vince Edwards

Vince Edwards (born Vincent Edward Zoine; July 9, 1928 – March 11, 1996) was an American actor, director, and singer. He was best known for his TV role as Dr. Ben Casey and as Major Cliff Bricker in the 1968 war film The Devil's Brigade. Edwards was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York City, New York, to Julia and Vincento Zoine, an Italian-American bricklayer. He and his twin brother, Anthony, were the youngest of seven children. He studied aviation mechanics at East New York Vocational High School, graduating in June 1945. An excellent swimmer, he worked as a lifeguard at Coney Island and swam for the Flatbush Boys Club. He was a standout on his high school swim team, also playing on the school's baseball and track teams. He studied at Ohio State University on an athletic scholarship, where he was part of the university's team that won the United States Swimming National Championships. After two years at Ohio State, he transferred to the University of Hawaii, where he spent much time training as a swimmer for the Olympics; an appendectomy cut short his swimming career before he was able to compete. While in college he was involved in theater productions. Edwards studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; his classmates included Anne Bancroft, John Cassavetes, and Grace Kelly. Around this time he became friends with character actor Nick Dennis, who introduced him to Marlon Brando; Dennis was then appearing alongside Brando in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1951, he signed a contract with Paramount Pictures, making his film debut as Vincent Edwards that year in Mister Universe. The following year he played the lead role in Hiawatha. Although he had major roles in several films, including the film noirs The Killing (1956) and Murder by Contract (1958), it was not until he was cast as the title character of the medical drama Ben Casey that he achieved stardom. Edwards was discovered for the role by entertainer Bing Crosby, whose production company made the series. Ben Casey ran on ABC from 1961 to 1966 and made Edwards a television star. Sources disagree on how many episodes of the series he directed himself: figures range from seven to a dozen to about 20 of the show's 154 episodes, said to have been his first regular directing work. He used the show's popularity to launch a recording career, releasing six albums. For much of this period he was represented by Hollywood agent Abner "Abby" Greshler of Diamond Artists, described in trade obituaries as one of the industry's first "super agents" for pioneering the package deals that combined stars, directors, and writers on a single project. In a 1988 Associated Press interview, Edwards recalled the suddenness of his rise to fame: "I went from obscurity to fame." As a result of the show's success and his own popularity, Edwards also appeared in the all-star war film The Victors in 1963. Even while Ben Casey was still airing, Edwards worked to build a parallel film career as insurance against the series ending. In a November 1963 interview, he outlined a plan to make one major theatrical feature a year for the next five years, contrasted his brooding on-screen image with his actual temperament, and pointed to Jim Garner and Steve McQueen as television leads who had successfully shed the typecasting of Maverick and Wanted: Dead or Alive. "If I'm a good enough actor," he said, "people will eventually forget that I played Ben Casey." Writing in his own newspaper column in 1962, Edwards described the years before his Ben Casey breakthrough as "pounding away at the Door of Opportunity for some 12 years" before it finally opened, and noted that columnists had already begun describing his interpretation of the character as surly, moody, sullen, irascible, explosive, and testy. When the Ben Casey television series ended, Edwards returned to acting in motion pictures with a major role in the 1968 war drama The Devil's Brigade, together with films such as Hammerhead (1968), The Desperados (1969), and The Mad Bomber (1973). He spent fourteen weeks on location in Utah filming The Devil's Brigade, and while filming Hammerhead on location in Lisbon, Portugal, he was hospitalized for several days in October 1967 after slipping and breaking a bone in his heel. In 1970, Edwards starred in another TV series, the short-lived Matt Lincoln, in which he played a psychiatrist running an inner-city telephone counseling hotline for troubled teenagers. In 1983, he played the main protagonist, Hawk, in the science-fiction film Space Raiders. He continued to act in film as well as in guest spots on television, including roles in The Rhinemann Exchange (1977) and Evening in Byzantium (1978), and the pilot episode of Knight Rider, "Knight of the Phoenix," in 1982. Edwards directed numerous episodes of Ben Casey itself (see above) and continued to direct television from the 1970s into the early 1990s. He directed single episodes of Police Story (1976), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and David Cassidy: Man Undercover (both 1978), B. J. and the Bear (the December 1979 episode "Silent Night, Unholy Night"), Fantasy Island, The Fall Guy (1982), and In the Heat of the Night (the 1990 episode "Indiscretions"), in addition to his work on Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980, detailed below. He wrote and directed the 1973 television film Maneater, co-writing the script with Marcus Demian and Jimmy Sangster; it premiered on ABC's Movie of the Week anthology on December 8, 1973, and was Edwards's first directing assignment on a television film, following his episodic Ben Casey work in the mid-1960s. He directed a number of episodes in a variety of television series including the original Battlestar Galactica, namely the two-part episode "The Living Legend" on the original series and the two-part "The Super Scouts" on its 1980 sequel series, Galactica 1980. He also directed, and with Christian I. Nyby II co-wrote, Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979), a theatrical feature assembled largely from "The Living Legend" for release outside the United States. He was also the voice of Jake Rockwell in the 1986 animated series Centurions, appearing in all 65 episodes, and provided additional voices for 13 episodes of the animated It's Punky Brewster (1985). In 1986 he co-starred as FBI Agent Frank Walker in the television film The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Twenty-two years after the series ended, Edwards returned to television as Dr. Ben Casey in a 1988 syndicated TV movie, The Return of Ben Casey, in which the character was depicted as having served as a surgeon in Vietnam and having since married and divorced. He made his last film, The Fear, in 1995. During his acting career, Edwards ventured occasionally into the recording studio, and a number of singles were released in his name. The most historically notable was never issued: Edwards is reported to have recorded "The Wonder of You" in 1958, before Ray Peterson's better-known 1959 version, which became an international hit and was later popularized by Elvis Presley; Edwards's recording has never surfaced. Edwards married four times. His first marriage, to actress Kathy Kersh, lasted from 1965 to October 1965 and produced one daughter. In March 1967, Edwards sought to have Kersh held in contempt of court, alleging in a filing that she had made it inconvenient for him to exercise his court-ordered visitation rights; he was awarded the right to see their daughter twice weekly following a hearing. Edwards's filing quoted Kersh's response to a visitation request as, "I have made other plans. The world does not revolve around you." Kersh later married actor Burt Ward. He next married Linda Foster, a British-born actress who had emigrated to the United States from Lancaster, England, in 1960. They wed on August 6, 1967, at the Beverly Hills home of singer Dean Martin, where the couple had met. The marriage