American character actor of rather bizarre range a member of the socalled John Ford Stock Company Originally a New York stage actor of some repute Whitehead entered films in the 1930s He played a wide variety of character parts often quite different from his own actual age and type He is probably most familiar as Al Joad in John Fords The Grapes of Wrath 1940 But twentytwo years later in his fifth film for Ford The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962 Whitehead at 51 was playing a lollipoplicking schoolboy He continued to work predominantly on the stage appearing now and again in films or on television In his last years he suffered from cancer and died in 1998 in Dublin Ireland where he had lived in semiretirement for many years
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