Will Geer
Will Geer actually William eye Ghere ( born March 9, 1902 in Frankfort, Indiana, † April 22, 1978 in Los Angeles ) was an American actor.
Will Geer is known to the German television audiences for his role as grandfather age in the family series The Waltons.
Life
The grown up in rural Indiana Will Geer was taught by his father 's interest in botany, which led to the beginning of the 1920s to a botany studies at Columbia University in New York City. During this time he first came into contact with the theater. He joined traveling theaters and was throughout his life, especially theater actor. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, he toured together with Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie through labor camps and was a member of the Group Theatre in New York, where he had an engagement in the play Tobacco Road from the novel by Erskine Caldwell on Broadway.
His social commitment Geer was in the 1950's undoing, when he came in the McCarthy era in the U.S. on the black list. He retired from the film business and founded with his wife, a private theater: the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, near Malibu in Los Angeles area. In the early 1960s he returned to the big screen, but mostly played guest roles in television series. He gained worldwide fame with the role of the grandfather in the television series The Waltons, which he played from the beginning of the series in 1972 until his death in 1978.
As a young man Geer had a love affair with the communists, union supporters and gay activist Harry Hay. In 1938 he married actress Herta Ware, with whom he had three children. The daughter Ellen Geer is also an actress.