Remembering Dana Andrews

Carver Dana Andrews was born on January 1, 1909 outside Collins, Covington County, Mississippi. He was one of thirteen children of Charles Forrest Andrews, a Baptist minister, and his wife Annis. The family subsequently moved to Huntsville, Texas, where his younger siblings (including the late actor Steve Forrest) were born.

 
He attended college at Sam Houston State University and also studied business administration in Houston, Texas. In 1931, he traveled to Los Angeles, California, seeking opportunities as a singer. He worked at various jobs, including pumping gas in Van Nuys. Reportedly, an employer paid for his studies in opera and also at the Pasadena Playhouse, a theater and acting school.
 
Andrews signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and nine years after arriving in Los Angeles was offered his first movie role in William Wyler's “The Westerner” (1940), starring Gary Cooper. He was also memorable as the gangster in the 1941 comedy “Ball of Fire”. In the 1943 movie adaptation of “The Ox-Bow Incident” with Henry Fonda, he played a lynching victim. His signature roles came as an obsessed detective in “Laura” (1944) opposite Gene Tierney, and as a U.S. Army Air Force officer returning home from the war in the Oscar-winning 1946 film “The Best Years of Our Lives”. In 1945 he co-starred with Jeanne Crain in the musical “State Fair”.
 
From 1952–1954, Andrews starred in the radio series ‘I Was a Communist for the FBI’ about the experiences of Matt Cvetic, an FBI informer who infiltrated the Communist Party. In 1963, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. Between 1969 and 1970, he appeared in a leading role as college president Tom Boswell on the NBC daytime soap opera ‘Bright Promise’. In 1960 he and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. starred in “The Crowded Sky”; fifteen years later, Andrews and Zimbalist appeared in “Airport 1975”, playing a businessman. In 1975 Andrews appeared in his only Euro-western: “Take a Hard Ride” as Mr. Morgan.
 
He spent his final years living at the John Douglas French Center for Alzheimer's Disease in Los Alamitos, California. Andrews died on December 17, 1992 from congestive heart failure and pneumonia.
 
Today we remember Dana Andrews on what would have been his 105^th birthday.