Don Murray arrived as a wholesome lead and spent the next sixty years declining to be one, choosing addicts, blackmailed senators and small-town bullies instead. The seriousness that cost him work is what makes his governor in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes stick.
Fi1m perspective
Breck runs a city in a black suit and never stops sweating in it. Don Murray plays the governor of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) as a small-town bully who has been handed a concrete plaza and a slave population and cannot believe his luck, shouting at subordinates because there is nobody to stop him. It is a cheap film with a real grievance, and Murray is the man the grievance is aimed at. We disliked him thoroughly, and we were meant to; what unsettled us was how ordinary he is, a middle manager with a police force, and how little the film has to exaggerate him to make the point.
That was not the career anyone planned for him. He came in as a wholesome lead, Bo Decker opposite Marilyn Monroe in Joshua Logan's Bus Stop (1956), and the studio wanted more of the same. He said later, "I wanted to do every time the opposite of what I had done the last time," and the record bears it out. A year after Bus Stop he was a drug-addicted veteran in A Hatful of Rain (1957); five years after that he was a blackmailed senator in Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent (1962). Addiction, homosexuality, race, the compromises of office: the subjects he was drawn to were the ones a studio lead of the period was not supposed to touch.
Critics have consistently found him convincing as the earnest, tormented man, and that is fair. The same critics have noted the cost. A run of morally serious parts, One Man's Way (1964) among them, gave him an air of righteousness that made him harder to cast in anything light, and the work came less often than it should have for an actor of his skill. What is interesting about Breck is that the righteousness is still there, turned inside out. Murray does not play a monster; he plays a man who is certain he is right, and the certainty is the horror.
The later decades were quieter: Knots Landing on television from 1979 to 1981, a supporting part in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and then a long absence before the Twin Peaks revival of 2017 brought him back as Bushnell Mullins. He also wrote and directed on occasion. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them at length here.
If you want to see what the refusal cost and what it bought, Conquest is the one we can send you to. It is a small part in a rubber-mask sequel, and he plays it as if it were Preminger.
Biography
Donald Patrick Murray (also credited as Don Murray) was an American actor, screenwriter and director. Born in Hollywood, California, on 31 July 1929, he trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
His film debut as Beauregard 'Bo' Decker opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (1956) brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He later appeared in Advise & Consent (1962), Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). On television he played Sid Fairgate in Knots Landing (1979–81) and Bushnell Mullins in Twin Peaks (2017). He also directed The Cross and the Switchblade (1970).
Murray played Jack Kelcher in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). He died on 2 February 2024.
