The Journey of Carroll O’Connor: Before, During, and After Archie Bunker on ‘All in the Family’

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Despite the fact that he actually accomplished so much more over the course of his life, you simply cannot think of the late Carroll O’Connor without having images of Archie Bunker and, in turn, the revolutionary Classic TV sitcom All in the Family come to mind. Created by Norman Lear, All in the Family, which ran from 1971 to 1979, arrived at a time when television was changing, moving away from light-hearted fare like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies to more realistic sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford and Son and, of course, All in the Family itself.

The latter almost immediately began breaking every taboo of the medium (starting with the audience actually hearing a toilet flushing for the first time!), looking at the issues of the day through the prism of the Bunker family. The Vietnam War, President Nixon, racism, homophobia — one by one the boundaries fell in a funnily dramatic way.

The Bunkers were led by conservative bigot Archie, who finds himself in constant screaming matches with his liberal son-in-law Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), who he not so affectionately refers to as “Meathead.” Mike’s wife, Gloria (Sally Struthers) is rapidly embracing the woman’s lib movement, and then there’s her mother, and Archie’s wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), the kind and seemingly flighty matriarch that Archie refers to as “Dingbat.”

While Carroll knew that Archie was the role of a lifetime, he had no illusions as to who and what the man really was. In a 1972 interview with the Los Angeles Times he opined, “Archie’s a loser. People like Archie live all over the country. They may be the largest part of the American middle class. They are conservative, perhaps without understanding why. Many have what I call the ‘fine people rationale’: they believe the fine people are conservative, so conservatism is best — it puts them close to the top. Success is part of our national religion; it’s the heaven we aspire to on Earth. I don’t think we ought to be ashamed of it, but I think we ought to understand it, because it has some heavy consequences. It produces Archie Bunkers.”

To discover more about Carroll O’Connor’s life and career before, during and after All in the Family, please scroll down.

Archie Bunker, as a character, is not someone that Norman Lear thought could change any more than he could change himself or his own father — who, it turns out, was one of the major inspirations for the character. “I adored my father,” Norman related to The Ithaca Journal. “And if he’s listening, he knows how much I miss him. But he was of another generation when prejudices were more pronounced, when people were saddled with bigotry which was passed down from one generation to another. And we used to argue, just as Carroll O’Connor argues on the series each week with Rob Reiner.”

Speaking to the Redlands Daily Facts in 1972, Carroll mused, “I don’t know how many Americans are as short-sighted as Archie. He’s a very ignorant man. He’s popular on the tube, because viewers enjoy watching him, but I don’t believe many of them would have him for a friend or feel that they share any of his traits. Remember, Archie is a victim, too, of his own education and background. His thinking was shaped at an early age when he was inculcated with bigotry. He got it from his parents.”

He noted that when he was a kid, he would hear racial slurs outside the home, but never inside it — his father did not tolerate racism and bigotry. Said Carroll, “A lot of bigots enjoy our show, but they must get the message that Archie is an unhappy man. He’s always bugged and not enjoying his life. The Archies of the world look down on all minorities, but some they consider worse than others. But, look, I’m not making Archie lovable. I’m making him a human being. And there’s always an element of love in a human being.”

Born John Carroll O’Connor on August 2, 1924 in New York City, he led a fascinating life long before he decided to give acting a go. He was the eldest of three brothers, the other two, Hugh and Robert, becoming doctors, the latter a psychiatrist. Carroll enrolled at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University, but dropped out once America became a part of World War II. Rejected by the U.S. Navy, he enrolled in the United States Merchant Marine Academy for a time and after departing from there, became a merchant marine ultimately serving in the United States Merchant Marines during the war.

“After that,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1972, “I visited some friends in Montana. I decided I’d better get my education like all good middle-class American boys do. I enrolled in the University of Montana.” There he met future wife Nancy Fields and he worked as an editor of the student newspaper the Montana Kaimin. He was forced to leave school when he went to Ireland to help his brother Hugh get into medical school. While there, he finished school at the University College Dublin.

Carroll said, “I had no ambition to be an actor. I wanted to have a permanent job as a professor of European history at some university. I thought on the side I’d write a historical novel or two.” Things started to change when he was joined by Nancy in Ireland after she graduated from the University of Montana and they were married on July 28, 1951.

He did some acting while in school and was seen by a producer named Sheila Richards, who brought him aboard the Irish Players group in Dublin. Noted Carroll, “The press said I was the only American actor who ever worked in Ireland who could perform an Irish part faithfully. And they were correct.”

Five years later, Carroll resumed his studies in America, earning a master’s degree in speech. Moving to New York, it was tough finding acting gigs until 1958, thanks to Burgess Meredith (the Penguin in the Adam West Batman show and Mickey in the Rocky film series), who was directing an off-Broadway adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next year he was hired for the off-Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’ Big Knife.

Prior to All in the Family, he appeared in such films as The Defiant Ones (1958), Cleopatra (1963), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Death of a Gunfighter (1969) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). He also began making television guest appearances. First on the anthology series Sunday Showcase and The United States Steel Hour in 1960, and then on shows like The Untouchables, Naked City, Death Valley Days, Bonanza, The Fugitive, I Spy, The Wild Wild West and That Girl. In 1971, he made his debut as Archie Bunker on All in the Family, playing the role through that show’s end in 1979 and from that point to 1983 in the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place.

The connection he made with the audience was immediate, and it was a little concerning to him as he admitted in an interview with the Petaluma Argus-Courtier in July 1971. “Everybody,” he said, “wants to know if I’m like Archie Bunker in real life. Maybe the relationship is too close. The public is beginning to forget Carroll O’Connor and think only of Archie Bunker. People call out to me on the street, ‘Hey, Archie!’ And I’m mad at CBS — they ran a big ad for the show with my picture, but not my name.”

Speaking to the Daily News-Post that same year, he said of the character, “There’s no question about it, Archie is a bigot. He’s not a philosophical bigot. He’s an inherent species who learned his prejudices from childhood. Archie is a reflexive figure. I think there’s some hope for him, but probably not much. I know a lot of Archie’s. He’s a composite of a half-dozen men I know.”

He explained that he was brought up in New York, so bigotry was no stranger to him. “I hope there isn’t a little of Archie in everyone,” he said. “But that is wishful thinking. Naturally our show gets lots of mail, but only one letter in a hundred is filled with hate. The rest is encouraging or simply fan mail.”

Following Archie Bunker’s Place, Carroll starred in the TV movies Brass (1985), Convicted (1986) and The Father Clements Story (1987). The following year (and running until 1992), he returned to series television as Sheriff Bill Gillespie on In the Heat of the Night, a sequel to the 1967 Rod Steiger/Sidney Poitier film of the same name that won the Oscar for Best Picture. Howard Rollins joined him as police detective Virgil Tibbs, who has returned to the fictional Sparta, Mississippi for his mother’s funeral and is persuaded by the town’s mayor to stay on as chief of detectives. He and Gillespie work together in solving crimes.

While the first six episodes of the show did well in the ratings, Carroll was not happy with the creative direction, actually thankful for the 1988 Writer’s Strike that created a forced hiatus. He proclaimed to The Journal News, “You cannot have a lot of people yelling ‘Freeze’ and have people toting a little .38 around as if it’s a cannon. During the strike, I insisted that my contract as story editor be taken seriously … I got rid of the executive producer at the time. Her name was still on the show, though, by some contractual mystery.” Things improved dramatically.

In an interview with The Signal of Santa Clarita, California in 1989, he was asked how Bill Gillespie — who in the film version of In the Heat of the Night was a bigot as well — differed from Archie Bunker. “They come from very different cultural backgrounds,” he said. “The similarities between the two would be almost nil except for the fact that the same actor is playing both parts. Archie would never give in or admit he was wrong. He is still carrying his old prejudices around. Gillespie is more intelligent. He understands that the old prejudices must be shucked off little by little.

“Rod Steiger’s version was probably closer to Archie,” he added. “Rod played him much tougher. It was the ‘60s and Gillespie had to reflect the reality of that period. Today, the South is an entirely different place. And my interpretation of Gillespie reflects that.”

With In the Heat of the Night ending, Carroll took on recurring roles as Jake Gordon in six episodes of the original Party of Five, four episodes of Mad About You as Jamie Buchman’s father, Gus Stemple and the TV movie 36 Hours to Die (1999). On the big screen he was in Gideon (1998) and Return to Me (2000).

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