Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,947
By This is the grave of Joseph Sweeney.
Born in 1884 in Philadelphia, Sweeney grew up pretty working class. He lived in rooming houses as a child, one of them at the same residence as W.C. Fields, which is a fact of totally random trivia. Anyway, at some point, he got interested in acting and by 1910 decided to make a go at it professionally. He started with a stock company in Norwich, Connecticut, was pretty good at it, and ended up on Broadway. He became a really standard theater guy, the type of solid character actor that makes a production work. He was no looker–just a regular guy. And that’s another huge news in acting, people who actually look like other people. Trying to make more money, he moved to television in the 1940s for the kind of adaptations of plays that dominated a lot of early TV. Imagine that today, people actually sitting something that wasn’t designed to be an addiction they would binge. He would occasionally be in a regular show like Car 54 Where Are You? but for the most part, he was a stock guy in the many theater-based shows.
This leads me to the one reason why Joseph Sweeney is remembered today and it’s a very good reason. He is Juror #9 in Twelve Angry Men, the older guy who is perhaps the most thoughtful of the jurors (other than Henry Fonda of course). He’s who the Lee J. Cobb and Ed Begley characters start yelling at when he moves toward Fonda’s side, beginning to turn the rest of the jurors against their bullying, awful ways. Sweeney debuted the role in the 1954 version on Westinghouse Stage One. I’m not sure if anyone else from the original play was picked up for the feature film, but I am glad Sweeney was. He is the epitome of decency in that film. I mean, Fonda is too of course, but in a very different way. Sweeney doesn’t have many lines, but he’s tremendously powerful when he does.
Hard to imagine anyone being moved by 12 Angry Men in the age of Trump and Farage and Orban. There is a Russian version called 12 that came out in 2007. Putin would probably have everyone locked up today for making that. The irony of that is that Nikita Mikhalkov, who made the film, is an absolutely stone cold Putinist who was barred from entering Ukraine for supporting the invasion back in 2014. Not quite sure he got the moral tenor of the play.
Sweeney could play villains too. That includes in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, when he plays the caretaker of Gregory Peck’s late mother who is stealing all the money. But usually he played a good guy. Mostly, Sweeney continued to do TV theater until almost the moment of his death, which was in 1963. He was 79 years old.
Joseph Sweeney is buried in Holy Speulchre Cemetery, Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania.
If you’d like this series to visit other of the 12 Angry Men, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Martin Balsam is in Paramus, New Jersey and Lee J. Cobb is in Hollywood. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.