Bryant Haliday(1928-1996)
- Actor
Bryant Haliday was born in Rhode Island and spent time in an English
Benedictine monastery. Entering Harvard to study international law, he
became involved with a group of students who were interested in putting
on plays. He caught the acting bug and abruptly gave up law to become a
man of the theater. They bought an abandoned church, converted it into
the Brattle Theatre (Haliday called the Cambridge, Massachusetts,
landmark "an unashamed imitation of the Bristol Old Vic") and produced
64 plays, joining the cast of over 50. He later opened a small movie
revival house and began hunting in Europe for film acquisitions;
picking up the rights to classics like
The Seventh Seal (1957)
and I Vitelloni (1953). Haliday and
partner Cyrus Harvey founded Janus Films.
Haliday was also a movie actor, turning up most regularly in the horror
thrillers of his producer friend
Richard Gordon
(Devil Doll (1964),
Curse of the Voodoo (1965),
The Projected Man (1966)),
among others). Late in life he lived in France, where he worked as a
producer, writer and actor in Paris theater and on French TV.
