Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Lee Marvin, who played Hickey in the 1975 movie version of the play, is known mainly for playing tough guys. Did you know he appeared in a Hollywood musical with other famous tough guy Clint Eastwood? It’s called Paint Your Wagon.
The final home of O’Neill, Tao House in Northern California, is now an historic site run by the National Park Service. That’s what happens when you’re the first American playwright to snag the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Long before he appeared on House, Robert Sean Leonard starred as Parritt in the 1999 Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh. He appeared alongside former Who’s the Boss star Tony Danza (Rocky) and all around Hollywood star Kevin Spacey (Hickey).
O’Neill supposedly based Harry Hope’s saloon/boarding house and the characters who inhabit it on two real-life places: a $3-a-month boarding house he lived in known as Jimmy-the-Priest’s and a dingy bar where he liked to drink lovingly nicknamed the Hell Hole.