The other day here, I linked to a video of a number from the 1997 Broadway revival of one of my favorite musicals, 1776. My buddy of half-a-century Joe Brancatelli suggested I mention that two of the three men in that video were not in those roles when that revival opened. When it opened (and when I first saw it), Brent Spiner was playing John Adams and Pat Hingle was playing Ben Franklin. The late Merwin Foard, whose passing we were noting, played Richard Henry Lee.
When I went back to see it many months later, Spiner and Hingle had departed. Michael McCormick was playing Adams, David Huddleston was Franklin and Merwin Foard was still playing Richard Henry Lee. The TV appearance I embedded was of that cast. But there was another cast replacement that intrigued me and I wanted to mention it. It involved the fine character actor, William Duell.
Mr. Duell, who passed away without enough notice in 2011, was one of those actors who worked all the time, alternating between screen and stage. The Internet Broadway Database has his first appearance on The Great White Way as 1954 with a revival of Threepenny Opera — but remember that's just Broadway. Almost no one starts a stage career on Broadway. He was born in 1923 so I'll bet you he was performing on stage for more than ten years before that.
There are many places you might have known him from. When 1776 first opened on Broadway in March of 1969, William Duell played the role of Andrew McNair, the Congressional Custodian who fetched rum for some of the delegates and who near the end of the play was sent up to ring the bell to proclaim American Independence. He repeated that role in the movie version which came out in 1972.
Two other places from which you might know William Duell: He had a real prominent role as one of Jack Nicholson's fellow inmates in the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And he played Johnny, the shoeshine man who gave Leslie Nielsen tips on how to solve every case on the short-lived, much-admired TV show, Police Squad. That's a photo of him as Johnny at right in the image at the top of this post.
As I mentioned above, in 1997 when the Roundabout Theatre Group opened their wonderful revival of 1776 at the Gershwin Theatre, Brent Spiner was Adams, Pat Hingle was Franklin and I should have mentioned that Michael McCormick was playing Caesar Rodney, the delegate from Delaware who was dying of cancer. If they thought to ask William Duell to reprise his role as McNair, they'd have been out of luck. He was not available because he was working six blocks away at the St. James.
He was playing Erroneous — a befuddled old man, abroad now in search of his children, stolen in infancy by pirates — in a revival of another of my favorite musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This was the production that starred Nathan Lane and I saw that one twice, too. He was great both times.
Okay now, follow this. When Spiner and Hingle left 1776, they brought Huddleston in to play Franklin and McCormick moved up to play Adams. So they needed someone else to take over as Caesar Rodney and they got…William Duell. Because that production of Forum had just closed.
His last Broadway job seems to have been in the revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 2000, also with Nathan Lane and still available as a DVD and for streaming here and there. His last credit seems to have been a part on the movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003. So he worked pretty steadily from 1952 to 2003. Going straight from one show on Broadway to another is not something a lot of actors can manage so I thought it was worth noting. It looks like his whole career was like that: One part after another.