Owen Bush

The laconic character actor Owen Bush was born on November 10, 1921 in Savannah, Missouri. Owen first became interested in acting in high school, when auditioning for a school play got him out of a boring study hall. In the late 1940s, Bush began working as a radio announcer, and in the early '50s, became a sportscaster on WDAF-TV in Kansas City. Like many television announcers in Kansas City at that time, Bush also frequently acted in industrial films made by the Calvin Company of Kansas City. There, he met the young director Robert Altman, who loved Bush's comic acting style and cast him in many short industrial "docu-dramas" as well as a bit part in Altman's first feature film, "The Delinquents," shot in Kansas City in 1956. In 1959, Altman who by this time was a busy director of episodic TV in Hollywood, convinced Bush to take a leave of absence from WDAF-TV and come out to California to play a regular role in a short-lived syndicated TV series Altman was producing called "The Trou