All the obituaries for Richard Widmark, who died this week at 93, talk about his roles as a villain in films, but I remember him mainly as Jim Bowie in “The Alamo” in 1960.
What I didn't know is that the Minnesota-born actor became interested in acting while giving lectures after a bicycle tour he made through Nazi Germany.
Apparently Widmark went on his bike tour of Deutschland in the early 1930s. He was unsuccessful in his attempts to visit a camp for political prisoners named Dachau, which later became one of Hitler's infamous extermination camps. However, he did sneak into a youth camp where he witnessed a “ferocious old boy yelling Nazi doctrines at these little kids.”
The Australian says that when he returned to the US, he incorporated some film he shot into a series of lectures on his trip. He found that he enjoyed public speaking, and he began taking acting lessons in college.
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