Before ‘Manhunt’: John Wilkes Booth has been a killer role in film and TV

John Wilkes Booth was desperate to be famous. Instead, he became infamous as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. He had been born in 1838 as the ninth of ten children of the famed actor Junius Brutus Booth. Though he had shown talent, his career was often derailed by his emotional instability. His older brother Edwin Booth was considered one of the top actors of the day.

The handsome younger Booth had received strong reviews in a New York production of “Richard III” with the New York Herald declaring him a “veritable sensation.” Booth even told the paper “I’m determined to be the villain.”  A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, by 1864 he had recruited several co-conspirators in his plan to kidnap Honest Abe. Their attempts failed, but on April 14, 1865, he learned Lincoln would attend the comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater that evening, During the third act he entered Abe’s box and shot him in the back of the head. Booth leapt off the balustrade screaming “Sic semper tyrannis” breaking his leg when he landed on stage. He managed to escape on a horse. Lincoln died the next morning.

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“Manhunt,” the acclaimed Apple TV +’s limited series, chronicles the 12 days it took to find Booth and co-conspirator David Herold on a farm in Port Royal, Virginia. Tobias Menzies plays Secretary of War and Lincoln’s (Hamish Linklater) good friend who is obsessed with finding the late president’s killer even putting his frail health to risk. And Anthony Boyle, recently seen as Harry Crosby the B-17 Flying Fortress navigator in Apple TV +’s “Masters of the Air,” is the egotistical, insufferable Booth who believes he’s God’s gift to the world.

Boyle joins a slew of actors who have played Booth in film and television.

Did you know that Jack Lemmon once portrayed Booth on the live 1956 “Ford Star Jubilee” presentation of Jim Bishop’s best seller “The Day Lincoln Was Shot”? The actor was then primarily for his comedic turns notably in 1955’s “Mr. Roberts,” for which he would soon win the best supporting Oscar, but he more than impressed as the steely-eyed assassin. Raymond Massey played Lincoln — he had earned an Oscar nomination for the 1940 “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and Lillian Gish was Mary Todd Lincoln.

Forty-two years later, TNT remade “The Day Lincoln Was Shot,” with Rob Morrow of “Northern Exposure” fame as Booth and Lance Henriksen as Lincoln. Variety wasn’t very impressed with Morrow: “As the frustrated, hostile Booth, Morrow delivers farm more mealy-mouthed mimicry than menace, sounding rather like a cross between Ted Turner and Rod Serling.”

Raoul Walsh, the actor who plays Booth in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist 1915 “Birth of a Nation,” would become one of the major filmmakers of the Golden Age of Cinema directing such classics as 1939’s “The Roaring Twenties,” 1941’s “High Sierra” and 1949’s “White Heat.”  Besides playing Booth, he was also an assistant director on “Nation.”

John Derek, who starred in such films as 1949’s “Knock on Any Door” and 1956’s “The Ten Commandments,” played Booth in the 1955 film “Prince of Players,” which focuses on the career of Edwin Booth (Richard Burton). Both actors earned praise from the New York Times describing Derek’s performance as “aptly flashy and grandiloquent.”

Booth died April 26th. He and Herold were holding out in the barn at Richard Garrett’s farm outside of Port Royale, Virginia when the troopers of the 16th New York Calvary found them.  Herold surrendered; Booth refused. The troopers set fire to the barn, and though the soldiers were given instructions not to shoot Booth. But one trooper said he saw the assassin pointing a gun at him, so he shot Booth through the spinal cord rendering him paralyzed. He died three hours later. And his last words? He looked at his hands uttering “Useless, useless, useless.”  He was 26.

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