ANDREW DUGGAN
28 December 1923 - 15 May 1988

Andrew Duggan was born in Franklin, Indiana and raised in Houston, Texas. Six feet five inches and 205 pounds Andrew came from a football background. His father, Edward coached and was a classmate and player with Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, but the young Andrew preferred acting.
A speech and drama scholarship took him to Indiana University where the head of that department described him as ‘one of the best readers of lines I ever had in class’. His talent saw him in the best roles in numerous campus plays, including the part of Private Marion in Maxwell Anderson’s ‘The Eve of St. Mark’, which was performed at Indiana by a student cast prior to it being later produced professionally on Broadway. The department head phoned the playwright, after he’d seen the New York production, and recommended Andrew’s version to him. Anderson had Andrew visit him in New York, to read for him. The playwright was so impressed that he cast Andrew in the role even though Andrew was a college sophomore with a limited amateur theatrical credit. Andrew was due to comment rehearsals on a Tuesday, but on Friday received his draft notice.
Life in the army wasn’t a bed of roses, but luckily it did provide some help with his acting career. He spent his first years in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. Andrew wasn’t the best soldier by any means and was eventually transferred to an Entertainment Production Unit under Major Melvyn Douglas in Calcutta. A member of a traveling GI theatrical company, Andrew recalled magicians who weren’t very good, and one-act-plays that were even worse.
He was discharged from the army in 1948 and returned to Indiana University. The same department head suggested he venture off to Chicago and resume his career where it nearly started. He won a small role in the local production of ‘Dream Girl’ which lead to a bigger role in the same show, but with a road company. As it turned out, Lucille Ball was the star.
Productions of ‘Paint Your Wagon’ and ‘The Rose Tattoo’ saw him on Broadway, but not often enough times to keep the money coming in during 1948 and 1952. Like most actors in New York, when he wasn’t in a production, he was doing what he could to survive.
It was during this time he met and married Betty Logue and had three children over the next 7 years - Richard, Nancy and Melissa.
Eventually Andrew ended up in Hollywood and began a long career in television and movies, which spanned 36 years. He co-starred in the 1959 ‘Bourbon Street Beat’ series, ‘Room for One’ in 1962, as well as General Ed Britt in ‘Twelve O’clock High’ which ran from September 1964 to January 1967.
In 1968 he began work as Murdoch Lancer the Scottish patriarch of Lancer, a 100,000-acre ranch near Monterey, California. Coming from an experienced background in theatre as he did, the 45 year old found himself in an unchallenging television series, and held a familiar, unpretentious opinion about the role, which he once described as ‘something which barely got through the second layer of a person’. He stayed with the series until its premature demise in 1970.
Not one to sit on his laurels, Andrew continued with films and television guest appearances until his early death from cancer in 1988 at the age of 64.
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