Sorrell Booke

Sorrell Robert Booke was born January 4, 1930, in Buffalo, New York, the son of Sol Booke, a local physician. Show business found him before he could tie his shoes: as a small boy he entertained his father's patients in the waiting room with impressions and jokes, and by age nine he was a working radio actor on Buffalo stations WGR and WEBR, known for his uncanny impersonations. He once won a radio contest for mimicking the voice of Adolf Hitler — a feat that, depending on who you ask, either demonstrates a prodigy's ear or a very different era's idea of a children's talent show. Either way, the ear was real.

Booke was also a ferocious student. He graduated as valedictorian of the Bennett High School class of 1946, enrolled at Columbia University at sixteen, graduated at nineteen in 1949, and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama, where he starred in a stage production of Beethoven opposite Paul Newman. Along the way he mastered five languages — Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish, with a working familiarity in several more. The United States Army took notice. During the Korean War, Booke served two years as a counterintelligence officer, a lieutenant working in the shadows: interrogating prisoners, translating intercepts, screening infiltrators. He almost never spoke publicly about what he actually did. Friends got the broad outlines and nothing more.

He came home and did what he had always wanted to do: act. He started off-Broadway in The White Devil, took his first television role on the anthology series Omnibus, and made his Broadway debut in 1956 in Michael Redgrave's production of The Sleeping Prince. He earned an Emmy nomination for his work on Dr. Kildare (in the episode 'What's God to Julius?'), played Senator Billboard T. Rawkins in the 1960 revival of Finian's Rainbow, and appeared in the original 1962 Broadway production of Fiorello!. Eighteen Broadway credits would eventually be his, stretching from 1917-era beginnings of his career path on the musical-comedy stage to hard-won dramatic leading-man parts in Maxwell Anderson plays like Mary of Scotland (as Lord Morton) and Valley Forge (as Lieutenant Colonel Lucifer Tench).

Film and television ate him up in the sixties and seventies. He took roles in Black Like Me (1964), the Cold War nightmare Fail-Safe (1964), A Fine Madness (1966), and — in one of the great ensemble farces — What's Up, Doc? (1972), playing the jewel thief Hugh Simon, one of four men chasing four identical overnight bags. On television he was everywhere: Mission: Impossible (1966), Ironside, Columbo, M*A*S*H (as General Wilson Spaulding Barker), Hawaii Five-O, The Rockford Files, The Love Boat, Newhart, and even Full House (as Lionel, the soap-opera director with delusions of grandeur).

Then came 1979, and with it Jefferson Davis 'Boss' Hogg, the corrupt, drawling, white-suited commissioner of Hazzard County — the man the Duke boys spent seven seasons outrunning, outwitting, and out-driving. Booke was only slightly overweight and wore a fat suit to become five feet around. He played the blustering kleptocrat as broad, joyous, harmless-but-not-quite cartoon villainy, never once winking too hard to break the spell. According to one oft-repeated account, he insisted before signing that Boss Hogg would never deal drugs and would never kill anyone — a villain, yes, but never a monster. One of the show's favorite behind-the-scenes stories, via John Schneider's DVD commentary, involves Booke and guest star Andrew Robinson — both fluent in Japanese — running a whole scene in Japanese just to baffle James Best, who played Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane.

He kept working after the Dukes: voice work (he was the wrestling announcer on The Tom & Jerry Kids Show in 1990), guest conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, stage returns. In his personal life he married Miranda Knickerbocker in 1958 — daughter of H.R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent — and had two children before their 1973 divorce. He died of cancer on February 11, 1994, in Sherman Oaks, California, just past his 64th birthday, and was laid to rest at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. His obituary noted that his intelligence and subtlety are too often overlooked behind the white suit — the fate of every great clown who did his homework.

Sorrell Booke was a scholar, a spy, and a stage-trained Shakespearean who chose to be remembered as the greediest man in Hazzard County — and played him with total commitment, which is the whole joke and the whole craft.

He understood the character actor's golden rule: the audience never forgets the role you commit to hardest. Boss Hogg was a cartoon, and Booke played him like it was Lear — because to him, somehow, it was.