John Forsythe Biography

The son of Blanche and Sam Freund, John Lincoln Freund began his career as a baseball announcer in New York City’s Ebbet’s Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Going on to play supporting roles on daytime radio soap operas in the early 1940s, he was soon appearing on the Broadway stage.

He began studying at the Actor’s Studio in 1945. His first significant film role was in the Cary Grant film, 'Destination Tokyo'.

In the late 1940s, Forsythe began moving towards television, where he would work for most of his career, appearing in live New York-based shows such as 'Studio One', 'Lights Out' and 'Climax'.

It was Alfred Hitchcock, who had cast Forsythe in several 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' and 'The Trouble With Harry', who advised the actor that he was more suited to the small, rather than the big, screen.

Forsythe’s time came in 'Bachelor Father' in 1957-62, where he played a playboy Hollywood attorney charged with bringing up his niece. Similarly, in 'To Rome With Love', as a widowed college professor in Rome, his character was bringing up three girls.

Forsythe was perhaps stuck in a paternal, avuncular rut, made no better by providing the voiceover for the off-screen Charlie in 'Charlie’s Angels' during the late 1970s.

However, it was 'Dynasty', which ran from 1981 to 1989, that truly made Forsythe a star.

As Blake Carrington, the head of the plutocratic family from Denver, Colorado, with Joan Collins as his ex-wife Alexis, Forsythe excelled in debonair style. He won two Golden Globe awards for the role.

Carrington was a symbol of the Reagan era, “capitalism’s most attractive symbol” in the words of Entertainment Celebrity Register. Forsythe even promoted his own Carrington fragrance in the mid-1980s. The series reconvened in 1991 for 'Dynasty: The Reunion'.

A sponsor of the World Wildlife Fund, the American Cancer Organisation and United Nations Association, Forsythe is in retirement, but gave his voice to the movie adaptation of Charlie’s Angels in 2000.

John Forsythe died on 1 April 2010 from complications of pneumonia, after a battle with cancer. He was 92.