Fred Crane, a former longtime Los Angeles classical music radio announcer who achieved a slice of film immortality when he played one of the handsome Tarleton twins in the 1939 movie classic Gone With the Wind, has died. He was 90. Crane, who had been hospitalized for a few weeks with complications related to diabetes, died of a blood clot in his lung Thursday in a hospital near Atlanta, said his wife, Terry.
Crane was said to be the oldest surviving adult male cast member of Gone With the Wind, producer David O. Selznick's epic production of the Margaret Mitchell novel starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. “I'm just a small shard in a grand mosaic," he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2007.
As Brent Tarleton, one of Scarlett O'Hara's young suitors, Crane spoke the opening lines in the film in a scene on the front porch of Tara with Leigh as Scarlett and George Reeves as his twin, Stuart.
What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is gonna start any day now, so we would have left school anyhow.
After Brent and Stuart express their excitement over the prospect of a fight with the Yankees, Scarlett replies:
Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream.
When he was cast in Gone With the Wind, the 20-year-old Crane hadn't read Mitchell's bestselling novel and wasn't even looking for a role in the film. “It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time," Crane later said.
A New Orleans native, Crane attended Tulane University and Loyola University in New Orleans and acted in local theater productions. In 1938, his mother decided that he should give Hollywood a try, and she gave him $50 and a one-way train ticket.
After arriving in Hollywood, Crane contacted his cousin, former silent film actress Leatrice Joy, who took him along with her to the Selznick studio, where her daughter was auditioning for the role of Scarlett's sister Suellen.
Evelyn Keyes wound up playing Suellen, but Crane's Southern accent caught the attention of the casting director, who called director George Cukor, and together they took Crane to meet Selznick.
“I read the opening scene right then and there with Vivien Leigh, and I got the job," Crane told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1999. He was put under a 13-week contract for $50 a week, which was “more money than I thought there was in the world."
