They called him the volcano. Not behind his back — to his face, in print, in green rooms where actors traded war stories the way soldiers trade scars. George C. Scott erupted: at directors, at producers, at interviewers, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at anyone foolish enough to mistake his silence for agreement. He drank like a man trying to drown something. He fought like a man who enjoyed it. And yet, those who truly knew him — the wives who married him, the co-stars who survived him, the audiences who watched him bare his soul on stage — insist that beneath the fury there was a tenderness so raw it could barely stand to be seen. This is the story of the man behind the eruption.
Forged in Hard Country
George Campbell Scott was born on October 18, 1927, in Wise, Virginia — coal country, hard country, the kind of place that makes hard men. His mother, Helena, died when he was eight years old, a wound that never fully closed. He was raised by his father, George Dewey Scott, an executive with Buick, and the household ran on discipline rather than warmth. Young George learned early that the world was not a tender place, and he armored himself accordingly.
After high school in Detroit, he did what restless, angry young men have always done: he joined the Marines. From 1945 to 1949, Scott served in the United States Marine Corps, stationed at the 8th and I Barracks in Washington, D.C., where he performed honor-guard duty at Arlington National Cemetery — standing at attention in all weather while America’s war dead were lowered into the earth. He also taught English and radio speaking at the Marine Corps Institute, an early hint of the commanding voice that would one day fill theaters.
The Marines gave him two things that never left him: a ramrod bearing that made him look like authority incarnate, and a lifelong contempt for phoniness, bureaucracy, and anyone who hadn’t earned their stripes. It also gave him, friends would later say, a darkness — too many funerals at too young an age will do that to a man.
Conquering the Stage
When Scott turned to acting, he didn’t start in Hollywood. He started where the work was hardest: the New York stage. After studying journalism at the University of Missouri on the G.I. Bill and discovering theater almost by accident, he threw himself into Shakespeare with the same ferocity he’d once brought to the parade ground.
His breakthrough came with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, where in 1957–58 he played the title role in Richard III — a performance one critic said was played with such coiled menace that audiences flinched. He won an Obie Award for that and for his work in Children of Darkness and As You Like It, and it was in Children of Darkness that he first appeared opposite a blazing young actress named Colleen Dewhurst — a meeting that would detonate both their lives.
Broadway came calling. His debut, Comes a Day (1958), earned him a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor. Then came The Andersonville Trial (1959–60), Saul Levitt’s searing drama about the Civil War prison camp, in which Scott played the relentless prosecutor — 179 performances, and another Tony nomination, this time for Best Actor. Over the decades he would collect five Tony nominations in total — for Uncle Vanya (1974), Death of a Salesman (1975), and Inherit the Wind (1996) among them — without ever winning. The stage was his first love and his truest home; even at the height of his film fame, he kept returning to it, as if Broadway were the one place where his intensity was not a problem to be managed but an instrument to be played.
And then there was his searing turn as John Proctor in the 1967 television production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — a role that fit him like a glove. Proctor, the flawed, prideful man who would rather hang than sign a lie, might have been written with Scott in mind: a sinner with an unbreakable core, destroyed by his refusal to bend. Scott played him with a volcanic shame and fury that left viewers shaken. It was, in miniature, the story of his whole life.
The Drinking and the Fury
No honest account of George C. Scott can skip the drinking, because the drinking was the weather system his whole life moved through. By his own admission and everyone else’s, Scott drank enormously — whiskey, mostly, in quantities that would have hospitalized lesser men. The stories are legion: the binges that shut down productions, the mornings-after that became afternoons-after, the legendary capacity that left drinking companions wrecked while Scott showed up on set, bleary but letter-perfect, having memorized pages of dialogue through the haze.
The alcohol fueled the temper, and the temper was the stuff of Hollywood legend. Directors learned to approach him the way lion tamers approach the cage — carefully, and never from behind. Stanley Kubrick, directing him in Dr. Strangelove (1964), discovered that Scott’s “serious” takes as the unhinged General Buck Turgidson were funnier than any comedy performance, and resorted to trickery — assuring Scott the cameras weren’t rolling on his wildest improvisations, then using them anyway. Scott was furious when he found out. He vowed never to work with Kubrick again. (He didn’t.)
On the set of The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), directed by John Huston, the two legendary hard-drinkers reportedly circled each other like rival gunfighters. Everywhere Scott went, the air crackled. Producers insured productions against him the way you’d insure against weather.
But here’s the thing the legend usually misses: the fury was never random, and it was never really about ego. Scott erupted at laziness, at stupidity, at disrespect for the work. He erupted at directors who didn’t know what they wanted and producers who cared more about the budget than the story. He was, in his own way, a moralist — a Marine’s moralist, with a Marine’s idea of how things ought to be done. The volcano didn’t erupt for nothing. It erupted because something was wrong.
Five Marriages, Four Women, One Storm
If Scott’s professional life was a series of eruptions, his personal life was the fault line they kept splitting open. He married five times — to four women — and each marriage was its own drama worthy of the stage.
His first two marriages, to Carolyn Hughes (1951–55) and Patricia Reed (1955–60), belonged to his hungry young years, before the fame. Then came Colleen Dewhurst — the great Canadian stage actress, “the Queen of Off-Broadway,” a force of nature nearly as formidable as Scott himself. They married in 1960, divorced in 1965, remarried in 1967, and divorced again in 1972. Two marriages to the same woman, twelve years of passion, combat, separation, and reunion. Friends described them as two volcanoes sharing one island — magnificent, terrifying, impossible. They had two sons together, including the actor Campbell Scott, and a bond that outlasted both marriages; Dewhurst remained a central figure in his life long after the papers were signed.
In 1972, Scott married actress Trish Van Devere, his co-star in The Day of the Dolphin and several other films. She was his final wife — the one who stayed. For twenty-seven years, through the drinking and the rages and the slow dimming of his stardom, Van Devere was his anchor, his defender, the person who saw past the eruption to the man underneath. When Scott died on September 22, 1999, of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at his home in Westlake Village, California, it was Van Devere who was there. She had tamed nothing — no one tamed George C. Scott — but she had loved him, steadily, to the end. That may have been the bravest performance of her life.
The Vulnerability Beneath
Here’s the untold part of the story, the part the “volcano” nickname obscures: George C. Scott was, by many accounts, a deeply vulnerable man. The bluster was armor. Those who worked with him closely talk about a surprising gentleness — with children, with animals, with young actors he took under his wing. He wept easily and hated being seen doing it. He was, friends said, terrified of being ordinary, terrified of being forgotten, terrified — perhaps — of the sadness he’d carried since he was eight years old and his mother died.
You can see the vulnerability in his best work, if you know where to look. It’s there in The Hustler (1961), in the flicker of something almost like pity that crosses Bert Gordon’s reptilian face. It’s there in Patton (1970), in the general’s tears at the graves of his men and his bewildered loneliness when the war ends and no one needs him anymore. And it’s there, most nakedly, in the role that became his beloved late-career signature: Ebenezer Scrooge.
Scrooge: The Late-Career Miracle
In 1984, at the age of 57, Scott starred as Ebenezer Scrooge in a television film of A Christmas Carol, directed by Clive Donner. It should have been a routine prestige-TV gig. Instead, it became one of the definitive screen portrayals of Dickens’s miser — ranked by many critics alongside Alastair Sim’s 1951 classic as the greatest Scrooge ever filmed.
Why did it work so well? Because Scott understood Scrooge from the inside. Here was a man encased in bitterness, armored against feeling, whose cruelty was the scar tissue over an old wound — and who, given one miraculous night, lets the armor crack and the buried tenderness flood out. Scott played the miser with genuine menace, not cartoon villainy; his Scrooge is frightening because you believe this man has truly killed something in himself. And when the transformation comes — the laughter, the tears, the almost childlike wonder — Scott plays it without a trace of irony, with total, trembling sincerity. It’s the most emotionally naked performance of his career, and it revealed what the volcano had been protecting all along: a heart the size of a cathedral.
The film has aired every Christmas season for forty years now, introducing new generations to George C. Scott — not as the raging general or the Oscar refusenik, but as a broken old man learning, at the last possible moment, how to love. There’s a poetry in that which Scott himself would probably have gruffly dismissed. He was never comfortable with sentiment. But the camera doesn’t lie, and neither did he, not when it mattered.
The Final Curtain
Scott worked until nearly the end. There were fine late performances — the vengeful Lieutenant Kinderman in The Exorcist III (1990), the sly lawyer in Malice (1993), a magnificent Juror #3 in the 1997 television remake of 12 Angry Men (which won him an Emmy), and, as his final role, Matthew Harrison Brady in the 1999 television production of Inherit the Wind — the same play that had earned him a Tony nomination on stage three years earlier. He died before it aired. The circle closed: the stage had given him to the world, and the stage, in a sense, took him back.
He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles — a small, unassuming cemetery for so large a man. No grand monument. No meat parade. Just a grave, and the work.
The Man Inside the Eruption
So who was George C. Scott, really? The drunk? The tyrant? The genius? The refusenik? He was all of those, but the truest thing ever said about him might be the simplest: he felt everything too much, and he had no idea how to feel it quietly.
The volcano wasn’t an act. It was the visible part of an invisible wound — the eight-year-old boy who lost his mother, the young Marine who buried strangers at Arlington, the artist who believed acting was sacred and watched the world treat it as a game show. He raged because he cared, drank because he hurt, and refused because he couldn’t pretend.
And every Christmas, when his Scrooge laughs through tears and shouts for the boy to buy the prize turkey, the volcano finally does what volcanoes almost never do: it warms the whole world instead of burning it. That was George C. Scott’s last secret, and his greatest gift — the fury was real, but the tenderness was realer. You just had to wait for the eruption to end to see what it had been protecting all along.