Five-time Emmy award-winning actor Carroll O'Connor (1924-2001) was best known for playing Archie Bunker, the big-hearted bigot on the groundbreaking 1970s television comedy All in the Family.

Early Years

Carroll O'Connor was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 2, 1924. He was the eldest of three sons of a lawyer and schoolteacher raised in an Irish Catholic household. The O'Connors weathered the years of the Great Depression in comfort, living in their single-family home in Forest Hills, Queens, at the time a wealthy neighborhood. His father was a successful attorney and his two brothers became doctors.

O'Connor was a poor student who later attributed his lackluster academic performance to being pushed ahead a year in school. In his memoirs, he described how he skipped kindergarten and entered first grade at the age of five: "Thereafter I became impossible to teach and nobody was comfortable with me." In 1941 O'Connor...