Mark Stevens was the man Hollywood stood next to the interesting person. Earnest, decent and steady in the film noirs and dramas of the late 1940s, he was almost never the reason to watch one, and almost never the problem either.
Fi1m perspective
A woman sits on a bench in the grounds of a state hospital and a man arrives to tell her she is his wife. In The Snake Pit (1948) the man is Mark Stevens, the woman is Olivia de Havilland, and she does not believe him. It is the position he was given in film after film: the decent husband, the honest man with a badge, the person whose job is to hold the ground so that somebody more vivid can move about on it. We felt for Robert Cunningham in that scene, because Stevens is playing a man who has all the facts and no way to make them land, in a film that has already decided the story belongs to the woman on the bench. De Havilland carries the picture; he is part of what she carries.
He arrived at Warner Bros in 1943 as Stephen Richards, playing servicemen small enough to go uncredited, and became Mark Stevens in 1945 when he moved to 20th Century-Fox and Darryl Zanuck renamed him. Fox gave him leads, in Within These Walls (1945) and From This Day Forward (1946), then put him at the centre of The Dark Corner (1946), a film noir the studio hoped would do for it what Laura had done. It did not make him a star, and the complaint that has followed him since was already there: the people around him were more interesting than he was. The Street with No Name (1948) sent him undercover against Richard Widmark in the semi-documentary FBI manner, and the villain took the picture. He never stood higher than that year.
The straight-arrow parts suited him because he did not fidget in them. He is a believable policeman and a believable husband, and there is a use for actors who can be believed without being watched. The trouble was that Fox kept building films around him as though he were the attraction, and he was not built to be looked at for ninety minutes; put him beside a stronger co-star and the eye leaves him every time. Henry Hathaway and William Keighley each directed him once. That steadiness is also why nobody remembers him much.
From the 1950s he stopped waiting to be cast well and started directing himself, in low-budget crime films such as Cry Vengeance (1954), in which he is also Vic Barron. He turned up on television in Big Town and Martin Kane, Private Eye, then from the 1960s lived in semi-retirement in Spain, taking the occasional film or television guest part into the 1980s. You will most likely meet him now in The Snake Pit, standing at the edge of somebody else's film and doing the job. Watch de Havilland, as everyone does, and then, once, watch him, and notice how little he asks for.
Biography
Mark Stevens (born Richard William Stevens) was an American actor who appeared in films and on television from the 1940s to the 1980s. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 13 December 1916, he also worked under the names Stephen Richards and Richard William Stevens. He began as a contract player at Warner Bros. before moving to 20th Century-Fox, where he took leading roles in several films.
Stevens is known for his performances in The Dark Corner (1946), The Street with No Name (1948) and as Robert Cunningham opposite Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit (1948). He also appeared in Objective, Burma! (1945) and later guested on television series including Murder, She Wrote and Magnum, P.I.. In addition to acting, he directed several films and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his television work. He died on 15 September 1994 in Spain.
