Carroll O'Connor Interview (December 17, 1991)

John Carroll O'Connor (August 2, 1924 – June 21, 2001) was an American actor, producer, and director whose television career spanned over four decades. He became a lifelong member of the Actors Studio[1] in 1971. O'Connor found widespread fame as Archie Bunker (for which he won four Emmy Awards), the main character in the CBS television sitcoms All in the Family (1971–79) and its continuation, Archie Bunker's Place (1979–83). O'Connor later starred in the NBC/CBS television crime drama In the Heat of the Night (1988–95), where he played the role of police chief William "Bill" Gillespie. At the end of his career in the late 1990s, he played Gus Stemple, the father of Jamie Buchman (Helen Hunt) on Mad About You. In 1996, O'Connor was ranked number 38 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.[2] He won 5 Emmys and two Golden Globe Awards.

Carroll O'Connor, the eldest of three sons, was born on August 2, 1924, in Manhattan,[3] New York City, to Edward Joseph O'Connor,[4] a lawyer, and his wife, Elise Patricia O'Connor (née O'Connor), a teacher. Both of his brothers became doctors: Hugh, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1961, and Robert, a psychiatrist in New York City.[3] O'Connor spent much of his youth in Elmhurst and Forest Hills, Queens, the same borough in which his character Archie Bunker would later live.[5]

O'Connor graduated from Newtown High School in Elmhurst. In 1941, he enrolled at Wake Forest University in North Carolina but dropped out when the United States entered World War II. During the war, he was rejected by the United States Navy and enrolled in the United States Merchant Marine Academy for a short time. After leaving that institution, he became a merchant seaman and served in the United States Merchant Marine during the war.[6]

After the war, O'Connor attended the University of Montana, where he worked at the Montana Kaimin student newspaper as an editor; in 1949 he resigned his editing position in protest to the pressure from the campus administration that led to the confiscation and destruction of an issue of the paper, which carried a cartoon depicting the Montana Board of Education as rats gnawing at a bag of university funds. At the University of Montana, he also joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.[7] O'Connor did not take any drama courses as an undergraduate at the University of Montana, but he did act in student theater productions. He met Nancy Fields (born 1929), who later became his wife, when she was working as a makeup artist and lighting technician in a student-produced production of "Our Town." He later left that university to help his younger brother Hugh get into medical school in Ireland, where Carroll completed his undergraduate studies at University College Dublin. There he studied Irish history and English literature, graduated in 1952, and began his acting career.[3]

After O'Connor's fiancée, Nancy Fields, graduated from the University of Montana in 1951 with degrees in drama and English, she sailed to Ireland to study at Trinity College Dublin and met Carroll, who was visiting his brother, Hugh.[8] The couple married in Dublin on July 28, 1951.[4] In 1956, O'Connor returned to the University of Montana to earn a master's degree in speech.[8]