James Whitmore, who died of lung cancer at the age of 87 at his Malibu home last week, was the Mr. Flinty of American character actors. Compact, bushy-browed, and shovel-faced, he had the look and manner of an economy-size Spencer Tracy. Whitmore won a Tony for his Broadway debut in the 1947 World War II play Command Decision. Entering movies two years later, he won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his Hollywood debut, the World War II drama Battleground. (He got the part after it was rejected by, yes, Spencer Tracy.) He would go on to play a hunchback small-time crook in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), provide narration for Huston's butchered Stephen Crane adaptation The Red Badge of Courage (1951), sing Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate (1954), go down fighting against the attack of the giant ants in Them! (1954), preside over the monkey assembly in Planet of the Apes (1968), serve as the corrupt chief inspector of the N.Y.P.D. in Madigan (1968), and witness the bombing of Pearl Harbor as General Halsey in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In more recent years, he appeared in The Majestic (2001), The Relic (1997), and most notably, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), as the elderly prison librarian who can't cut it on the outside. He also did a lot of TV, including an especially sharp 1986 PBS production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with Aidan Quinn and Joan Allen. He also won an Emmy Award in 2000 for a guest appearance on The Practice.

Whitmore also has a special place in recent theatrical history as a major popularizer of the historical-figure-based one man show. He started out with a stage show called Will Rogers' USA, where he made with the lasso and the familiar wisecracks, which was recorded for TV in 1972; he later moved on to Harry Truman with Give 'Em Hell, Harry, which was made into a 1975 movie version that earned him another Academy Award nomination. Three years later he filmed his tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, Bully! These things had their folksy charm in their day, and Whitmore is not to be blamed for the fact that after he'd had some success with them, it seemed as if every paid-up member of the Stage Actors Guild was climbing onstage in some period costume with a copy of Bartlett's Quotations tucked under one arm. (In 1986, he provided the voice of the title character of the Will Vinton Studios Claymation feature The Adventures of Mark Twain, thus muscling in on Hal Holbrook's racket.) He was married four times to three different women, including the actress Audra Lindley and his wife at the time of his death, Noreen Nash. He was married to his first wife, Nancy Mygatt, from 1947 to 1971, and remarried to her from 1979 to 1981. They had three sons, including James Whitmore III has directed for TV and acted in TV (The Rockford Files, Baa Baa Black Sheep) and movies (The Long Riders) under the name James Whitmore, Jr.