A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of May
Marked Encounters
May 19, 1971 marked the death of British-American actor, Alan Young.
Alan Young was born Angus Young on November 19, 1919, in North Shields, Northumberland, England, to Scottish parents. The family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, when he was a toddler, and to West Vancouver, Canada, when he was six years old. Bedridden as a child because of severe asthma, he came to love listening to the radio. By the time he was in high school, Young already had his own comedy radio series on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation network.
After leaving the Canadian armed service, Alan Young moved to Toronto and resumed his Canadian radio career, where he was discovered in 1944 by an American agent who brought him to New York to appear on American radio. He first appeared on the Philco Radio Hall of Fame. This led to his own American radio show, “The Alan Young Show”, a NBC summer replacement for entertainer Eddie Cantor’s show.
Alan Young’s film debut was in the 1946 film “Margie”, a romantic comedy that became a box office hit. Moving to TV, he wrote a pilot for CBS in 1950, resulting in live variety revue “The Alan Young Show” that earned him the 1951 Best Actor Emmy and the nomination for outstanding personality. After that show’s cancellation, Young acted in “Androcles and the Lion”, “Gentlemen Marry Brunettes” and two films produced by George Pal: the 1958 “Tom Thumb” and the 1960 film “The Time Machine” base on the story by H.G. Wells and starring Rod Taylor.
Young was best known, however, for the CBS television show “Mister Ed” which ran from 1961 to 1966. In this series, he starred as Wilbur Post, the owner of Mr. Ed, a talking horse who would not talk to anyone but him, thus causing comic situations for Wilbur Post, with his wife, neighbors, and acquaintances. Young was approached for “Mister Ed” by producer Arthur Lubin, who had created the popular 1950 film “Francis the Talking Mule”. Young initially turned down the part but eventually accepted it. Owning a portion of the show, he made a fortune off the royalties.
During the 1970s he became active in voice acting. He voiced Scrooge McDuck for numerous Disney films, and voiced Haggis McHaggis on “The Ren and Stimpy Show”. With Bill Burt, Young wrote the autobiography “Mr. Ed and Me,” which was published in 1995.
After 1997, Alan Young lived in Woodland Hills, California, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, a retirement community, where he died of natural causes on May 19, 2016 at the age of 96.