Our hour with the late Hal Holbrook

Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their children moved into the house they’d had built at Nook Farm in Hartford — the house that we now call the Mark Twain House — in 1874, 150 years ago this year.

Partly to celebrate that anniversary, we present this hour a new version of our 2015 interview with the late Hal Holbrook.

Holbrook was probably best known for his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, which he performed for 63 years — longer than Samuel Clemens used the Mark Twain moniker.

Beyond Mark Twain Tonight!, you probably know Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. He’s in a Dirty Harry movie. He’s in a Steven Spielberg movie. He’s in Wall Street and The Firm and John Carpenter’s The Fog. He appeared on Designing Women and The West Wing and The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy and Grey’s Anatomy.

Hal Holbrook won a Tony Award. He was nominated for 12 Emmys, and he won five. And he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Into the Wild.

We talked to Holbrook on the evening of February 3, 2015. He was two weeks shy of his 90th birthday — which birthday he celebrated by performing Mark Twain Tonight! at The Bushnell in Hartford.

Hal Holbrook died in 2021. He was 95.

GUEST:

• Hal Holbrook: Was a film, television, and stage actor

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This interview was originally produced by Betsy Kaplan.

Colin McEnroe, Cat Pastor, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, parts of which originally aired February 4, 2015, in a different form.

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