Kevin McCarthy, who acted on stage, in the movies and on television for seven decades, has died at age 96. He was best known for his starring role as the panicked doctor who tried to warn the world about the alien "pod people" in the 1956 science-fiction classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the Los Angeles Times obit noted. (Shown here in a scene with Dana Wynter.) Some speculated that the film was a veiled slap at Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his hunt for Communists, but the actor rejected that notion. He said years later that it was "about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave."
But McCarthy also starred in much deeper fare, including Arthur MIller's "Death of a Salesman," where he played son Biff on stage and screen.
He and sister Mary were orphaned after their parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic. While he took to acting, she became a well-known novelist, essayist and critic. Among her works were the best-selling novel "The Group," about the post-Vassar lives of eight members of the Class of '33. She died in 1989.