Kevin McCarthy, a versatile actor who forever earned a place in horror-film history as the small-town doctor who uncovers a chilling secret in the 1950s thriller “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday of pneumonia at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96.
McCarthy, the brother of novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy, enjoyed a reputation as an extraordinarily busy and dependable performer over eight decades.
In addition to his work in Broadway productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill and Anton Chekhov, McCarthy appeared in the 1949 London stage production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” McCarthy reprised the role of Biff Loman, a drifter who struggles to meet his father’s expectations, in the 1951 film version of the play and earned an Academy Award nomination for his supporting performance.
As Dr. Miles Bennell in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), McCarthy played the lone human holdout as pod-dwelling aliens take over his neighbors’ bodies while they sleep. The low-budget movie, directed by Don Siegel of the later “Dirty Harry” series, was not initially a hit but has since become one of the science-fiction genre’s most beloved and critically acclaimed films.
Over the years, the film was seen as a metaphor for anti-communist paranoia, and some accounts have gone so far as to suggest that McCarthy was cast because his surname suggested the red-baiting U.S. senator, Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy always maintained the filmmakers merely set out to make a good scare film. “There was no assignment of political points of view when were making the film,” he told the Bangor Daily News in 1997.
He made a memorable appearance at the start of the 1978 “Body Snatchers” remake.
After the original “Body Snatchers” film, McCarthy had supporting roles in dozens of films and TV shows, often portraying smooth-talking men with a corrupt or slightly sinister edge to them. He was a scheming campaign manager in “The Best Man” (1964); a roller-derby promoter in “Kansas City Bomber” (1972), starring Raquel Welch; and a lobbyist in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992), starring Eddie Murphy.
On television, McCarthy was the patriarch of a Florida family on “Flamingo Road,” a dramatic series on NBC in the early 1980s.
In addition to his film and TV career, McCarthy remained a stalwart performer onstage, including Broadway. Since 1978, he also toured in a one-man show about President Harry S. Truman called “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!”
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