Emmet Van Heflin, Jr. was born in Walters, Oklahoma on December 13, 1910. Of French-Irish descent, his father Emmet senior was a dentist. The Heflins later moved to Oklahoma City, and when young Van was in the seventh grade, the family pulled up stakes and moved to Long Beach, California.Van’s first sight of the Pacific ocean kindled a love of the sea and seafaring that lasted the rest of his life. Van Heflin was one of the most unusual and talented actors ever to appear on screen. Known as an "actor’s actor," he gave strong performances without resorting to showy flourishes and histrionics. In private life, he shunned the Hollywood limelight and his career suffered.Heflin was at home on stage as well as on screen, an unusual trait in Hollywood. Most actors have career fluctuations, but Heflin had to make a comeback more than once.  Perhaps the most unusual thing about this actor was his love of the sea. He was first a seaman, and then an actor. His film career was almost a fluke, an accident that enriched the screen.  He resolved to become a sailor, but first he enrolled in Long Beach Polytechnic High School. On summer vacations he shipped out on schooners bound for ports in Hawaii, South America, and Mexico.  After graduation, young Heflin signed up on a tramp steamer bound for Liverpool, England. Though the work was hard, the freedom of the sea appealed to his wanderlust. But the siren call of the sea could not drown out parental summons to continue his education.  Heflin enrolled at the University of Oklahoma. By all accounts, he was a good student who seemed to have little interest in acting or theater. There are different versions as to how he became an actor. None seems completely credible.  He was overheadrd speaking of Broadway, he said, "It’s like Hawaii. You dream you can reach up and pick mangoes or beautiful babes out of the trees.You find it’s just another place."  After the play folded he was like a spurned, the "rejected" suitor went back to his first love, the sea. For the next couple of years, he sailed on voyages that took him to the Far East, South America, and Alaska. He became skilled enough to earn his third mate’s "ticket."
    But once again, parental pressure brought him back to dry land. He returned to the University of Oklahoma to complete his degree. Upon graduation in 1931, he decided to take another look at acting. He enrolled in Philadelphia’s Hedgerow Theater, and later at the Yale School of Dramatics. Practical experience was gained by a season of summer stock in Denver.  The prodigal returned to New York, hoping to pick up the pieces of his Broadway career. But Heflin was not welcomed back with open arms. Broadway looked down on those who "abandoned" the stage, and a two-year absence might as well have been twenty. As it was, Heflin left California in a pretty despondent state. "I felt like a failure," he later admitted, "and come to think of it, I was." There’s a possibly apocryphal story that Heflin still had his third mate’s ticket in his pocket, just in case.
    Obscurity would not be his fate. Blessed with a rich, deep speaking voice, he was a natural for the airwaves. He became a radio soap opera regular three times a day. Eventually, he chalked up some 2,000 performances.  Heflin was paying the bills, but he might have faded away, just one voice among so many. Playwright Philip Barry plucked him from the crowd and put him up for a part in a new work called Philadelphia Story. Barry knew Heflin and had him in mind for the role of the slightly cynical, left-wing reporter.  The actor accepted Barry’s invitation but stormed out during rehearsal because he didn’t like the way he was treated in the third act. "Which gives you at a glance," Heflin later remarked with self-deprecating humor, "the measure of my brains."   Luckily, Barry could imagine no man in the role other than the moody, introverted young actor. Things were smoothed out, and Heflin became a cast member.
    The female lead in Philadelphia Story was Katharine Hepburn, in temporary exile from Hollywood because of a string of flops which branded her "box office poison." Opening in 1939, the play was a smash hit that ultimately revitalized Hepburn’s film career. The play helped Van as well.
    Always drawn to success, Hollywood took a renewed interest in Heflin. Warner Bros. took advantage of his vacation from Philadelphia Story to sign him to Santa Fe Trail (1940). Essentially an Errol Flynn vehicle, the movie supposedly documents the events just prior to the Civil War, including abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
    Santa Fe Trail is ludicrous as history, with so many distortions, omissions, and just plain fabrications it could give a history professor apoplexy. For example, George Custer (Ronald Reagan) is seen as Jeb Stuart’s (Flynn) classmate at West Point. The real Custer was a 14-year-old schoolboy at the time. Santa Fe Trail was an "A" picture with a large budget and fine production values. Heflin enjoyed making the movie, and his performance was so good he was advised to continue playing "heavies." Hollywood in a sense didn’t know what to do with Van Heflin. His strong personality and resonant voice placed him squarely in the leading man category, but his looks did not. He could not compete with a celluloid Adonis, except in the quality of his acting. For the most part he walked the thin line between leading man and character actor.  His Santa Fe Trail role finished, Heflin returned to the stage and Philadelphia Story. A film version of the play was in the works, but Van was not asked to reprise his role. This was to be Katharine Hepburn’s comeback, and the producers "stacked the deck" by giving her the support of Cary Grant, with James Stewart, in Heflin’s reporter role.
    Heflin made an effort not to see the movie version of Philadelphia Story until the play was closed. He was afraid Stewart’s performance might influence his own. Once the play ended, Heflin saw the picture and was amazed by its quality. He began to reconsider a film career.
    Armed with new resolve, Heflin phoned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer casting director Billy Grady and asked for a screen test. Request granted, and Heflin was teamed with a young Hollywood hopeful named Donna Reed. Their test came out well, and Heflin was offered an MGM contract.
    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the most powerful and prestigious studio in Hollywood, a dream factory without peer. Ironically, Heflin’s first MGM pictures were mediocre vehicles.
    His first picture was The Feminine Touch (1941), a piece of romantic fluff that teamed him with Rosalind Russell and Don Ameche. Better things were to come. Johnny Eager (1942) cast Heflin in the role of Jeff Hartnett, an erudite man whose misfortune it is to be the friend of a sadistic thug named Johnny, played against type by Robert Taylor.
    Taylor’s acting was very good, but Van stole the picture with a finely crafted portrait of a man on the ropes. He’s a drunkard who has hit bottom, yet retains tattered remnants of respectability. He’s an educated man who can quote Shakespeare, and somehow his conscience and sense of decency have not completely deserted him.  His peers took notice and honored him with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1942.
    Another entry in the Heflin resume was Kid Glove Killer (1942). The movie is noteworthy because it was his first leading role. Essentially a whodunit filmed in an almost documentary style, the movie featured Heflin as a scientist/inventor. Critics noted that his "wan smile" and "dry drawl" typecaste him, yet conceded he "could create a character with intelligence."
        Van married actress Frances Neal on May 16, 1942. It was his second marriage. (Some years earlier he was married for about six months to Esther Ralston.) Van and Frances shared the fate of so many couples during World War II and had to endure a period of separation after he entered the U.S. Army. Eventually, he served as a combat cameraman in the Ninth Air Force in Europe.
    At war’s end, Heflin resumed his career with the noir feature The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946).     In 1950 Heflin amazed industry pundits by asking MGM for a release from his contract, which had two and a half years to run. The studio did not give him a full release but reduced his commitment to twelve weeks a year. This allowed him to do television and return to Broadway.
    Van was not through with movies. In 1952 he was cast in Shane, one of the finest westerns of all time, with a sterling cast, literate script, and beautiful location filming in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Shane toplines Alan Ladd in the title role of a mysterious gunslinger. Heflin is a homesteader named Starrett, Jean Arthur is his wife, and young Brandon de Wilde is his son.
    The movie not only added a great film to Van’s credits; it also gave him an enduring friendship. Though Heflin was an introspective loner more at home on the sea than at Ciro’s, he could be a good friend, too. Well read, given to flashes of anger and moments of dark self absorption, he seemed to understand the demons that haunted a fellow actor like Alan Ladd. Van was a stabilizing anchor to the slim, blond superstar who never got over his insecurities and fear that fame and fortune could disappear overnight. Once, while undergoing an interview, Ladd became angry and uncooperative. Heflin arrived and managed to smooth the troubled waters.
    Heflin returned to Broadway, where he got good notices for A View From The Bridge. He still appeared in movies, though there was a slow decline in quality. Made in Europe with an international cast, The Tempest (1959) is a sweeping costume picture set in 18^th century Russia. Heflin turned in a bravura character study as Pugachev, a Russian peasant who leads a revolt against Catherine the Great.
    By contrast, 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is a small picture, almost a programmer, that nevertheless features a good script and a fine performance by Heflin as "Dan Evans," an ordinary cowboy forced into extraordinary events.
    By the 1960s, Heflin’s movies were uneven—some dreadful, some average, and a few outstanding. Though the epic picture was largely dead by the mid-‘60s, a few refused to see the handwriting on the wall. Director George Stevens, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, stumbled when he made The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). As a life of Jesus Christ, it was overly reverent, even boring. Max Von Sydow tries hard as Jesus, but the "Sunday School" dialogue defeats him.
    Stevens also gave the kiss of death to the project by including dozens of actors in wasted cameo roles. One critic has called it "Jesus on the Love Boat." Van Heflin as "Bar Amand," was given little to do but stand around in a white robe.
    Far more interesting was Under Ten Flags (1960), the story of a German surface raider during World War II. Heflin is the German captain, a decent man who is caught in a dilemma. He loathes the Nazis, yet wants to serve Germany.
   Heflin also appeared in many prestige television dramas, including Playhouse 90. One memorable project was Rod Serling’s Certain Honorable Men. The teleplay, which aired in September 1968, featured Heflin as a U.S. Senator.
    TV gave Van both good and bad experiences. His appearance on This Is Your Life was straight out of an introvert’s nightmare. One can only wonder if Ralph Edwards was looking for a very uncooperative subject for a TV bio when he picked Van. An intensely private man, Van resented the public display and hated the way details of his life were paraded in soap opera fashion. The upbeat, snappy patter of Edwards served only to sour Heflin who was obviously angered by the whole thing.
    By the Sixties the production code was starting to crumble. Movies became much more graphic in sex, violence, and language. As an actor looking for work, Heflin was forced to go along with the trend. Even earlier, in 1963, Heflin played a rapist in the Philippines in Cry Of Battle (1963).
    Audiences were changing too, and the youth market was targeted by Hollywood. With The Big Bounce (1969), producers tried to capitalize Ryan O’Neal’s puppy dog charm with Leigh Taylor-Young’s ‘60s’ sensuality. Heflin plays "Sam" a justice of the peace who picks up drifter O’Neal and sets the plot in motion. The caliber of the movie is shown in the last scene when Taylor-Young gives O’Neil "the finger." Luckily, Heflin didn’t have to end his career with a rude gesture.
    Airport (1970) was Heflin’s last screen appearance and one of his finest performances. He’s "D. O. Guerro," a pathetic soul battered by the storms of life. A failure, he hopes to "redeem" himself by blowing himself up on an airliner so his wife can collect on a life insurance policy.
    Heflin’s performance is subtle, showing the pain behind the madness. He skillfully blends a careworn face with withered body language to elicit sympathy for a defeated man. He seems all too human even though he is a monster who wants to blow up a plane carrying hundreds of innocent people. Airport was full of cliches, but it was an exciting picture and became one of the hits of 1970.
    Van’s personal life came to a sad transition point. After 25 years of marriage, he divorced his wife Frances and moved into a bachelor’s apartment. The couple had three children; two daughters, Vana and Cathleen, and a son, Tracy.
    Still the outdoorsman in old age, Van tried to keep in shape. He loved to go sailing and fishing in the ocean. Rain or shine, he swam 20 laps a day in his apartment complex’s pool.
    On July 6, 1971, he was stricken with a heart attack while swimming. He somehow managed to get to the pool’s ladder, where he held on until found later in the day. Rushed to the hospital by paramedics, he lay unconscious for days, apparently never regaining consciousness. Van Heflin died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on July 23, 1971. He was 60 years old.
    A private man to the last, he had left instructions forbidding a public funeral. Instead, his cremated remains were scattered on the ocean. The sailor had returned to the sea.
    Van Heflin was an anomaly. He wanted most of all to be a seaman, yet he had an actor’s soul, capable of greatness on stage and screen