Grant shows up 52 minutes in the movie, a stranger knocking on the door of a kindly couple who offer him water and then ask him to sit down to dinner with them. Unfortunately, this routine color western, starring Rory Calhoun as a deputy for Sheriff Dean Jagger, was a rather forgettable film. Red Sundown (1956) was one of his first starring parts and he is just electrifying. He was called to Hollywood to test for the lead in a projected series that never came into being, but was given a screen test at Universal-International Pictures and was signed to a long-term contract within 48 hours. After that he was cast in off-Broadway plays and began to do New York live television. It was an intensive boot camp for actors, with a new play every week and days filled with endless rehearsals and nightly performances. The judge for the festival was Rosalind Russell. At 21 he won the prestigious Barter Theatre acting award which offered him a salaried summer season performing in Abingdon, Virginia. One bogus press clipping said that he fell in love with a girl who was in training to be a nurse and who was killed in Korea. He enlisted in the United States Air Force and served from 1948 to 1953. Williams grew up in Queens, NY and early was bitten by the acting bug, performing in many summer stock productions as a boy. And because Williams was so incredibly guarded about his private life, the author makes no assumptions about the rumors of Grant’s homosexuality. Stampalia had to dig through thousands of press clippings and sort through the hyperbole and pure invention that makes up most publicity in Tinseltown. I recently read a biography about Grant Williams (who I knew next to nothing about) by Giancarlo Stampalia, and it’s a fascinating portrait of an unheralded, talented actor and melancholic loner, whose career may have fizzled early, but is deserving of this loving tribute. It has haunted me through years of repeated viewings. It was such a soulful, heroic, and incredibly moving performance. I still exist!” But what really got me was Grant Williams as Robert Scott Carey. 6 months later he realizes his clothes no longer fit, and as he drastically shrinks in size he goes to a doctor, who tries to find an antidote.īut Carey continues to diminish, eventually pursued by a household cat when he is the size of a doll accidentally knocked down in the basement which causes his wife to conclude he died.Ĭarey then wars with a frightening giant spider for a moldy piece of cake left by his wife.īeautifully directed by Jack Arnold and based on a novel by Richard Matheson, this had the most existential of endings with Carey dissolving into the infinite, coming to a metaphysical realization, “Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. It was the story of Robert Scott Carey, on vacation with his wife on a boat when a weird, shimmering, irradiated mist cloud passes over him. I was quite young when I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man in a movie theater but the film had a profound effect on me.
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