E.G. Marshall’s Invented Past
When the actor E.G. Marshall died in 1998 — remember him in the movies 12 Angry Men and Interiors, as well as a slew of TV shows, including The Defenders? — the world’s media took note. Newspapers and magazines passed along many tidbits on Marshall’s life: that he was born on June 18, 1910 (Variety), that he was “of Norwegian stock” (Peoplemagazine), that his full birth name was Edda Gunnar Marshall (The Times of London), and that he “was educated at Carlton [sic] College and the University of Minnesota” [London’s Independent].
Much of it was wrong.
I was interested in Marshall’s Minnesota roots, so I began an examination of the late actor’s past. I discovered that records at the Steele County Courthouse in Owatonna, Minn., listed him as being born on June 18, 1914, as Everett Eugene Grunz, the son of Charles and Hazel Grunz, who claimed only German, Scottish, Irish, and English ethnicity. “There is no Norwegian ancestry in the family that I know of,” I heard from Joe Grunz, Marshall’s youngest and only surviving sibling, who lived in Williams, Minn.
The Grunz family moved from Owatonna to St. Paul when Marshall was about eight, and he went through the public schools there. Joe Grunz speculated that his brother may have used a busy thoroughfare in St. Paul, Marshall Avenue, as the inspiration for his stage name.
