See also Biography Index (T) :: Filmography Index (T) :: Discography Index (T)

He was David Thayer Hersey from an upper crust Medford, Massachusetts family that did not share his budding interest in acting. After secondary school he began attending the local big school - Harvard University. The acting kept getting the better of him from year to year, and he finally left Harvard without graduating to concentrate on acting. His family was so adverse to his career detour that they asked him to disassociate the family name from something like acting by changing his professional name - a rather stereotypical attitude to which he nonetheless acquiesced . He made a quick inversion of names and became Thayer David-for good. More acting classes and theater training followed. But the family did relent - at least his father, the wealthy Thayer Frye Hersey, was impressed enough with his son`s dedication to the Veterans` Theater Workshop (founded in 1946 in Cambridge, Mass. as an alternative to the various caste-oriented Harvard dramatic societies) that he bought the late 19th century Brattle Hall social center for them. The workshop group became the Brattle Theater Company which until folding in 1952 would host notable stage stars in their productions.

Thayer David was tall and heavy-set with a prominent beetling brow and protruding lips (a somewhat intimidating demeanor) which inevitably bound him to character roles. But he had no false allusions about leading man roles and whatnot other than applying a consummate passion for being a good actor in those parts allotted him. To this he brought a forceful if pursed and imperious voice and a knack for developing voice characterizations to fit any part.

By late 1950 he was on Broadway in a revival of the comedy play "The Relapse" Through most the 1950s he was busy with theater roles rounded with returns to Broadway for the next two decades in some great dramas, including stepping in as a replacement to play Cardinal Wolsey in "A Man for All Seasons" (1961-63). Like many a trained actor looking beyond the stage, David saw the potential of the small screen as a new acting vehicle. By 1957 he had launched his TV career amid the television playhouse phenomenon which had been established by 1950. He would revisit perennially through most of the 1960s, but he had about the same time been discovered by filmdom as well.

His first role was in the quite well done Baby Face Nelson (1957), part of the body of serious dramas that Mickey Rooney (as the machine gun-happy 1930s gangster) was amassing since his early days as one of Hollywood`s biggest juvenile stars. David next film had the clumsy and long forgotten title A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), but it was a much more substantial part with young John Gavin as German friends who become World War II officers and confront humanity versus the Nazi war mentality. As was usual with his roles, David was the veiled (if not overt) antagonist-always intellectual but with a brutish shadow. Within a year the chance to play a really melodramatic villain came with his casting in the film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) from the novel by the visionary French 19th century sci-fi author Jules Verne. Although the film substantially strayed from the novel, the latter plodded along, while the script was fast-paced and engaging. And where there was no villain except nature herself, the film had David as the self-serving-downright nasty - Count Saknussem. With James Mason heading the cast and-then-teen heartth