page_title: Thomas Mitchell (actor)
section_title: Acting career
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Mitchell (actor) / Acting career
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Thomas Mitchell from the trailer for the film High Barbaree.
context_page_description: Thomas John Mitchell was an American actor. Among his most famous roles in a long career are those of Gerald O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, Doc Boone in Stagecoach, Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life, Pat Garrett in The Outlaw, and Mayor Jonas Henderson in High Noon. Mitchell was the first male actor to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award.
  Mitchell was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Supporting Actor for his work in the films, The Hurricane, and Stagecoach. He won the award for his role in Stagecoach. He was nominated three times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series in 1952 and 1953, for his role in the medical drama The Doctor, and won in 1953. While he was nominated again in 1955, for an appearance on a weekly anthology series, he did not win. Mitchell won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, in 1953, for his role as Dr Downer in the musical comedy Hazel Flagg, based on the 1937 Paramount comedy film Nothing Sacred, rounding out the Triple Crown of Acting. In addition to being an actor, he was also a director, playwright, and screenwriter.
context_section_description: He became an actor in 1913, at one point touring with Charles Coburn's Shakespeare Company. Even while playing leading roles on Broadway into the 1920s Mitchell would continue to write. One of the plays he co-authored, Little Accident, was eventually made into a film (three times) by Hollywood. Mitchell's first credited screen role was in the 1923 film Six Cylinder Love.
   Mitchell's breakthrough role was as the embezzler in Frank Capra's film Lost Horizon (1937).
  Following this performance, he was much in demand in Hollywood.  That same year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Hurricane, directed by John Ford.
  
  Over the next few years, Mitchell appeared in many significant films. Forty-three of the fifty-nine films in which he acted, were made in the 10-year period from 1936–1946. Considered one of the finest character actors in film, in 1939 alone he had key roles in Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Only Angels Have Wings, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Gone with the Wind. While probably better remembered as Scarlett O'Hara's loving but doomed father in Gone with the Wind, it was for his performance as the drunken Doc Boone in Stagecoach, co-starring John Wayne (in Wayne's breakthrough role), that Mitchell won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. In his acceptance speech, he quipped, "I didn't know I was that good". Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Mitchell acted in a wide variety of roles in productions such as 1940's Swiss Family Robinson, 1942's Moontide, 1944's The Keys of the Kingdom (as an atheist doctor) and High Noon (1952) as the town mayor. He is probably best known to audiences today for his role as sad sack Uncle Billy in Capra's Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) with James Stewart.
  From the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Mitchell worked primarily in television, appearing in a variety of roles in some of the most well-regarded early series of the era, including Playhouse 90, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater (in a pilot episode that became the CBS series Johnny Ringo), and Hallmark Hall of Fame productions. In 1954, he starred in the television version of the radio program, Mayor of the Town. In 1955, he played Kris Kringle in The 20th Century-Fox Hour version of The Miracle on 34th Street opposite Teresa Wright and MacDonald Carey. In 1957 he hosted  The O. Henry Playhouse. In 1959, he starred in thirty-nine episodes of the syndicated television series, Glencannon, which had aired two years earlier in the United Kingdom.
  In the early 1960s, Mitchell originated the stage role "Columbo", later made famous on NBC and ABC television by Peter Falk (Bert Freed played the part on live television before Mitchell portrayed Columbo on stage); Columbo was Mitchell's last role.
caption: Trailer for High Barbaree (1947)
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