Another great one gone

The Washington Post has an obituary by Adam Bernstein:

Van Johnson, 92, a disarming and popular Hollywood star of 1940s musicals and comedies who later proved effective as a G.I. grunt in Battleground and a conflicted Naval officer in The Caine Mutiny, has died. Mr. Johnson died 12 December at Tappan Zee Manor, a senior citizens home in Nyack, New York. No cause of death was immediately reported.
Starting in the late 1940s, Mr. Johnson took many viewers and reviewers by surprise for his dramatic performances. He was especially good as a presidential candidate's wily campaign manager in Frank Capra's State of the Union in 1948, with Spencer Tracy as his client. Mr. Johnson also portrayed a sneaky aide to a general in Command Decision and a cynical rifleman in William Wellman's Battleground, a film praised for its harrowing depiction of combat during the Battle of the Bulge.
Mr. Johnson was singled out by critics as the executive officer who sells out the paranoid Captain Queeg (played by Humphrey Bogart) in The Caine Mutiny, based on the best-selling novel by Herman Wouk. All of those films almost totally reversed the screen persona Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio chief Louis B. Mayer first established for Mr. Johnson, a onetime Broadway chorus boy elevated to immediate stardom during World War II. Injuries from a car crash prevented Mr. Johnson from being drafted during the war. In the absence of many male rivals, he was heavily promoted and became extremely popular.
He also played romantically inclined wartime pilots in A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, both dramas in which he showed he could hold his own against co-star Spencer Tracy. In the second film Mr. Johnson played a pilot in the Doolittle raid over Japan.
Charles Van Johnson, whose father was a plumbing contractor, was born 25 August, 1916, in Newport, Rhode Island. His parents divorced, and he was raised by a strict father who discouraged his early interest in acting. His mother, an alcoholic, disappeared from his life until 1946, when he got her a studio job. She later sued him to increase her financial support, and they settled out of court. After high school graduation, Mr. Johnson headed to New York with $10 to find work as an actor. Within a few months, he won a part in the Broadway revue New Faces of 1936, which also featured comedian Imogene Coca. He later said he got the part by mistake, when a director mistakenly ordered him to get onstage for a scene. He said he had only been in the theater to attend rehearsal with a friend in the show. The next year, Abbott rewarded Mr. Johnson with the part of Gene Kelly's understudy in the Broadway production of Pal Joey, also a Rodgers and Hart musical. A Hollywood screen test led to his leading role in the Warner Brothers cheapie Murder in the Big House with Faye Emerson, but the studio was unimpressed (so were ticketbuyers) and let his brief contract expire.
He had better luck at MGM, largely through the support of actress Lucille Ball, whom he had befriended. At MGM, Mr. Johnson underwent an apprenticeship as the second lead in a handful of pictures.
While starring with Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne in A Guy Named Joe, he was in a car accident that resulted in a metal plate being inserted into his head. He was left with a scar that was often covered up, but which he let show in some of his grittier films. He later spoke with appreciation of Tracy and Dunne for using their clout to halt filming during Mr. Johnson's three-month medical recovery. He won positive reviews in the movie, which led to frequent work during the next several years. By 1945, only Bing Crosby was a bigger box office star.
His film work dwindled, but he returned for a small role in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo as a patrician 1930s film character who has trouble improvising when one of the cast members jumps offscreen into reality. Mr. Johnson began to call himself the King of Dinner Theater, as he spent decades as a fixture on the regional stage. He also became a mainstay of guest spots on television dramas, notably on Murder, She Wrote, which starred his old MGM colleague Angela Lansbury.
A painter since his MGM days, Mr. Johnson had several one-man shows. He told People magazine he developed a devil-may-care style he dubbed Van Go: "I like to paint in one swell foop."
Mr. Johnson had a famously difficult private life. He married Evie Abbott Wynn in Juarez in 1947 on the day her divorce became final from actor Keenan Wynn, who had been Mr. Johnson's best friend. Studio chief Mayer encouraged the union to quell rumors about Mr. Johnson's alleged homosexuality, according to Mayer scholar Scott Eyman. Mayer also gave Keenan Wynn a better movie contract so he would not complain.
The Johnsons, who became known for hosting sumptuous Hollywood parties, were divorced in 1962 in a bitter proceeding. Their daughter, Schuyler, became estranged from her father and wrote a scathing first-person account of him in 2005 that appeared in the Mail on Sunday, a London newspaper.

Rico says Van Johnson gay? What's the world coming to?