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Famous Like Me > Actor > D > Jimmy Dean

Profile of Jimmy Dean on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Jimmy Dean  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 10th August 1928
   
Place of Birth: Plainview, Texas, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

This article is about Jimmy Dean, singer, television performer, and sausage entrepreneur. You might be looking for James Dean.


Jimmy Dean

Jimmy Dean (born Seth Ward on August 10, 1928 in Plainview, Texas) is an American singer, actor, and businessman.

Ward became a professional entertainer after a stint in the U.S. Air Force in the late 1940s using the stage name, "Jimmy Dean." He became the host of the popular Washington D.C. TV program Town and Country Time and, with his Texas Wildcats, became favorites in the region. Both Patsy Cline and Roy Clark got their starts with Dean, who eventually fired Clark, his lead guitarist, for chronic lateness. He had his first hit, "Bummin' Around," in 1953.

Dean went on to New York in the 1950s where he hosted another TV variety show for CBS and signed with Columbia Records. He became best known for his 1961 song "Big Bad John" that went to No.1 on the Billboard charts. The song won Dean the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. He had several more Top 40 songs including a Top 10 in 1962 with "PT 109", a song in honor of PT-109 and John F. Kennedy. In the early 1960s he also hosted the Tonight Show on occasion and one night introduced Roy Clark, with whom he'd remained friendly, to a wider audience, something that helped Clark enhance his career.

His mid-1960s ABC television variety show was one of the first to present country music entertainers with dignity and class, on their terms. Roger Miller, George Jones, Charlie Rich, Buck Owens and others got some of their first network TV exposure on the Dean show, also best remembered for his regular sketches with one of Jim Henson's long running muppet, Rowlf the Dog.

When the show ended, he began to dabble in acting in the late 1960s, with his best-known role being that of millionaire Willard Whyte in the 1971 James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever. Dean also performed around the country and around 1969 founded the Jimmy Dean Sausage brand originally called "Pure Pork Sausage."

Despite ups and downs (some revolving around his problems with his partner-brother Don Dean), the Jimmy Dean Sausage company did well, in part due to Dean's own extemporized, good-humored commercials. Its success led to its acquisition by Consolidated Foods, later renamed the Sara Lee Corporation. Over time, Dean remained involved in running the company, though they eventually began phasing him out of any management duties, a traumatic period that took a toll on his health.

In January 2004, Dean said that the company Sara Lee had dropped him as the spokesman for the sausage brand. In the fall of 2004, he released his blunt, straight-talking autobiography, 30 Years of Sausage, 50 Years of Ham. Today, Dean lives in semiretirement with second wife Donna Meade Dean, a former singer who helped him write his book.

External link

  • Why Jimmy Dean started making sausage, from FreeEnterpriseLand.com
  • Jimmy Dean at the Internet Movie Database

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Jimmy Dean