Broadway & Hollywood Musical Star Howard Keel Dead at 85
Keel was born Harry Clifford Leek in Gillespie, Illinois on April 14, 1917. He moved to Southern California as a teenager, becoming a high school sports star in Falbrook, California, also winning a scholarship for singing. After school, Keel began working for Douglas Aircraft as a manufacturing representative travelling to various company plants. While on the road with his job, Keel continued singing, picking up prizes in Mississippi and at the Chicago Music Festival. He started singing professionally at the American Music Theatre in Pasadena, California shortly thereafter.
Oscar Hammerstein II chose Keel to fill in for vacationing star John Raitt as Billy Bigelow in the Broadway production of Carousel. Soon, Keel was also playing Curly in Oklahoma!, a role that he took to London when the show premiered in the West End.
But there was even greater fame to be found in Hollywood. Keel gained instant stardom as Betty Hutton's singing cowboy love interest in the 1950 film version of Annie Get Your Gun and subsequently enjoyed half a decade of musical stardom, mostly at MGM, in a number of lavish and tuneful comedy-dramas. Tall and rugged, with a zestful confidence ideal for cheerful braggadocio and a stirring baritone voice to go with it, Keel appeared in a host of other musicals through 1955 including Show Boat, Jupiter's Darling and Kismet. Especially notable was Kiss Me, Kate, the best of his several vehicles opposite soprano Kathryn Grayson. An even better film was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, in which Keel tamed Jane Powell. His good-humored robustness also aided him in similar chastising duties opposite tomboyish Doris Day while on loan to Warner Brothers for 1953's Calamity Jane. He also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1958-59.
Keel returned to the New York stage in the late 1950s, starring once again as Billy Bigelow in the 1957 City Center revival of Carousel. The short-lived Broadway musical Saratoga at the Winter Garden Theatre followed, as did a run in Richard Rodgers' No Strings, replacing Richard Kiley in the role of David Jordan. In 1972, Keel opened in his final Broadway show, the musical Ambassador which he had earlier headlined in the West End, that played for only 19 performances at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
On the big screen, Keel moved into action leads after traditional song-and-dance musicals were no longer produced regularly by the studio system. Most notable were The Big Fisherman, the science-fiction flick, Day of the Triffids and a handful of Westerns including Waco and Red Tomahawk.
After his final Broadway show, Keel continued to perform in live theatrical productions around the country in shows including Camelot, Man of La Mancha, Paint Your Wagon, I Do! I Do!, Plaza Suite, Gigi, Show Boat, Kismet, The Most Happy Fella and The Fantasticks. He reunited with Powell in a 1977 tour of South Pacific and the following year in a stage production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
In 1981, Keel, mustachioed and attractively silver-haired, returned to a wide popular audience for over a decade when he began playing Clayton Farlow, second husband to Miss Ellie Barbara Bel Geddes on the popular CBS primetime soap Dallas. Keel's final high-profile film credit was as one of the hosts of That's Entertainment! III.
Keel is survived by third wife Judy Keel and four children--daughters Kaija, Kristine and Leslie and son Gunnar.