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Oliver Douglas


Oliver Wendell Douglas was the major character in the 1960s CBS situation comedy Green Acres. The character's name was inspired by famed Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and possibly also by then-Supreme Court justice William Orville Douglas.

Portrayed by Hollywood veteran Eddie Albert, Oliver Wendell Douglas was a New York City attorney who had long harbored a dream of moving to the Midwest and operating a farm rather than practicing "big city" law. His wife, Lisa, a glamorous Hungarian immigrant (who was played by Eva Gabor), had absolutely no desire to leave sophisticated New York City for a backward, rural area. His idea also met with stringent resistance from his own mother, Eunice (Eleanor Audley), who sided with Lisa against leaving New York City for the hinterlands.

However, once they actually arrived at their newly purchased farm (a run-down nightmare whose farmhouse was little more than a dilapidated shack), it was Lisa, not Oliver, who immediately fit into Hooterville and its weird collection of zany characters. Oliver had a high opinion of farmers in theory; he often made a speech in which he referred to "crops shooting up out of the ground" (which his wife, Lisa, in her Hungarian accent, repeated as "crops shoosting out of the ground") and other platitudes about rural life, which on the program was invariably accompanied by a background of patriotic music (Yankee Doodle to be exact); other characters frequently searched for the source of the music. Oliver was usually presented in the light of being the only sane character in an insane world; however, he, too, had his quirks, such as driving his tractor wearing the same three-piece suits that he had formerly worn to practice law and addressing nearly every other person in Hooterville as Mr. or Mrs., though the Hootervillians referred to each other by first names (although they apparently reciprocated by continuing to refer to him as "Mr. Douglas").


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