Rock Around the Clock

Frederick Francis Sears was an American film actor and director. Though a marginalized figure in 1950s cinema, he created 52 feature films in a number of genres for Columbia Pictures from 1949 to 1957, before his death at the age of 44. Born in Boston on July 7, 1913, Sears attended Boston College... High School, then Boston College until the stock market crash of 1929 forced him to withdraw after a single semester. He toured the RKO circuit for two or three years as a dancer in vaudeville, until it collapsed. Sears went back to Boston as an apprentice with the Copley Stock Company, eventually becoming the company juvenile. In the late 1930s, Sears served as the stage manager of John Barrymore's touring company for one of the actor’s last productions, My Dear Children. Moving to Memphis in August 1941, Sears became the resident director of the Little Theater and joined the faculty of the Southwestern University on February 17, 1942. He married, but his workload pushed Sears to the brink of exhaustion, and on October 15, 1942, he attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.
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