William Holden, whose birth is one century today. He fulfilled his "golden dream" in 1939 when a Columbia talent scout signed him as the protagonist of "Golden Boy", where he would fight his own battle, this time in the ring and with his fists. The luck of his beginnings vanished at the end of his journey, and his last breath was certified by a trip over a rug in his house, which ended his life at the age of 63.
A tireless fighter, against whom he could not even cancer, he served two years in the US Air Force as a lieutenant but soon returned to the industry to fight with success. Of course, he first had to go down into the mud. The first Oscar nomination of his found her face down in a swimming pool. The death that Billy Wilder "commissioned" him in "The Twilight of the Gods" served for the studies to try to sentence, without success, the genius who, according to Garci, "beat the so-called American dream like no one else", but also to raise the man with "the opportune smile", as Pedro Crespo described him on ABC in the early eighties, who earned the nickname of a heartthrob courting the lesser star played by Gloria Swanson in the film.
A similar beginning to the end of the actor, who survived cancer but could not overcome a setback. Thus, at the age of 63, he died "of natural causes, but very unusual ones", as José María Carrascal, then ABC correspondent in New York, would write on November 19, 1981: "Finding himself alone, the artist slipped on a small carpet on the polished floor, hitting his head against a marble table. On this occasion, however, it was not fiction, nor the withered Norma Desmond that orchestrated his outcome, but his own addiction to alcohol, the amount of which was double what was allowed in California "to consider an individual inebriated."
A little more than two decades earlier, this conqueror masquerading as an on-screen cynic tasted his peak, again under the command of Wilder, whose "Traitor in Hell" gave him the only Oscar of his prolific career, peppered with a few great titles. but also of a lot of straw, the quality mixed with the popular impact.
A hunk surrounded by divas
It was Holden accompanying the divas of the time in his tapes, taking advantage of Swanson's airs in her Californian mansion, quarreling with Humphrey Bogart over Audrey Hepburn, and, paradoxically, helping Grace Kelly take care of her alcoholic husband.
Among his many merits was leading, until 1961, the popular list of the ten golden men of the Hollywood industry, but also being the highest-grossing actor two decades before Steven Spielberg inaugurated the blockbuster with his "Jaws".
Until his death, his by no means meager filmography continued to grow, with more than sixty titles, among which "Network", "The Bridge on the River Kwai", "Wild Group" or "The Colossus on Fire" stand out. But not even his committed dedication to the seventh art prevented him from claiming, like a good lover, other fields, and he delved into writing to raise the figure of his best friend, to whom he paid tribute in "Susan Hayward: a star matchless." Like her, William Holden was also.
