So few people in this area know that an Oscar-winning actor was born in St. Cloud.
Born Byron Elsworth Barr, his acting name was Gig Young. He usually played second-fiddle roles, which frustrated him his entire life because actors other than him always got the top billing.
Second fiddle or not, he was a superb supporting actor known for suave good looks and adept at both drama and comedy. He was nominated three times for an Oscar for best-supporting actor, first for “Come Fill the Cup” (1952) in which he played an alcoholic who quits the bottle to save his marriage. His second nomination was for his work in “Teacher’s Pet,” a comedy with Doris Day and Clark Gable (1959). Young played a boozy, debonair intellectual.
Young struck Oscar gold for playing “Rocky,” a cynical promoter/emcee in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” (1969). Starring Jane Fonda, it was about a grueling dance marathon during the Great Depression when destitute contestants (couples) danced round and round in a ballroom to the point of ragged exhaustion day and night to win the big, elusive prize money.
Like a carnival barker, Rocky verbally whips the dancers on – insulting them, cajoling them, trying to keep their spirits up with his hollow enthusiasm – his repeated chants of “Yowza! Yowza!! Yowza!!! A great performance in a grim but powerful drama.
It’s eerily prescient that Young was nominated three times for playing boozers because alcohol abuse is partly what led to his appalling, tragic death.
He was born in St. Cloud in 1913. His father owned a pickle-canning plant in south St. Cloud, not far from the current South Junior High School. He attended Riverview Grammar School and later Tech High School, where he was a member of the male cheerleading team, the “Peppy Techs.” He worked fitfully at his father’s factory but hated the monotony. What he loved most was acting in school plays and watching movies at the Paramount Theater, where he for a time was an usher.
After high school, Barr went to Los Angeles where he earned a scholarship to the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse. A talent scout saw a play there and was struck by the talents of two actors – Byron Barr and George Reeves. The scout secured them sign-ups with Warner Brothers. (Reeves found fame as TV’s Superman. Like Barr, he too later committed suicide.)
In an early 1940s movie, Barr played a man named Gig Young. Barr decided to use that name for his own. For four decades, Young’s career flourished.
In 1941, he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard, serving until war’s end. Then his long string of movies and TV work continued. In 1971, he won an Emmy for “The Neon Ceiling,” a TV movie. After his death, the Emmy was donated to the Stearns History Museum.
Young, who had one daughter, was married five times. One of the wives was Elizabeth Montgomery, who later starred as Samantha in the TV series, “Bewitched.” She divorced him due to his worsening alcoholism. He lost the role of the “Waco Kid” in the comedy-western “Blazing Saddles” when he fainted from alcohol withdrawal the first day of shooting. Gene Wilder then got the part. Young was also fired from the role as “Charlie” in TV’s “Charlie’s Angels.”
His last role was in a 1978 movie “Game of Death.” That same year, he married a German magazine editor who, at 31, was half his age. Three months after their marriage, one day after grocery shopping they returned home to their Manhattan apartment. Young, age 64, shot his wife dead, then shot and killed himself. It’s awful to think Young became the murderer of that young wife before taking his own life.
Many said chronic alcohol abuse, combined with his faltering career and his long disappointment over rarely landing leading roles, pushed him over the edge.
He was buried next to his parents in a North Carolina cemetery under a grave marker inscribed with “Byron E. Barr.”
