 John
McPhail was born in Burlington, North Carolina to Weston and Judith
McPhail on December 24, 1941. His father worked as a bank and his mother
was a homemaker. Johnny, the eldest of four children, attended North
Burlington High School and went on to attend Duke University in Chapel
Hill, N.C., where he earned B.S. in economics 1963. While working after
college as a junior manager at the accounting firm Malmouth, Howell, and
Stern, he met Adele Howell, and they were married in June of 1967.In
1972, Johnny and Adele moved to Oxford, where he and college friend
Arthur Elias established a small bookkeeping and accounting service. The
McPhails' only child, Ruth, was born in 1973; she settled in the San
Francisco area after graduating from Stanford University with a degree
in computer science. Adele has worked in the Spanish department of the
University of Mississippi as an administrative coordinator since 1980.
McPhail now devotes quite a bit of energy to acting. Always a film
fan, he developed an interest in acting and he leapt at any chance he
got to read scripts, be involved with stage plays, or work on film sets.
He is mostly retired from his accounting practice, except for a few
clients here and there, and devotes as much time as he can time to
auditions and script reading. He has worked as a stand-in for Jon Voight
in The Rainmaker, and been in a scene with Debra Winger in Big
Bad Love. He has also appeared in several other movies filmed in the
area including Cookie's Fortune, The Chamber, The
People vs. Larry Flynt, A Time to Kill, and The Gun in
Betty Lou's Handbag, as well as several documentaries and
educational videos produced by PBS and by the University of Mississippi.
In addition to his film work, McPhail also has won roles in several
Oxford stage productions including Going Up, Symmetry,
Paper, Swim, Sail Sun & Fish, The Taming of the Shrew,
Larry Brown's Dirty Work, and Larry Brown's Joe. He has
also worked as an announcer, an emcee, and a performer for local radio
programs and supper clubs.
In the fall of 2003, McPhail met Corwin Fitz in an Oxford bar.
Fitz often made wild claims in conversations with other bar patrons and,
at the time, McPhail wrote him off as a drunk. By March 2004, McPhail
hadn't seen or thought about Fitz for several months when he saw the
younger man's call for actors in a local newspaper. McPhail remembered
Fitz from the bar and decided to respond to the ad to see what it was
all about. McPhail found Fitz a changed man from their last interaction
and the two quickly became friends. At Fitz's invitation, McPhail joined
the cast of the movie and, soon after, retreated to a lodge in a remote
area of Yoknapatawpha County with the other members of the film's cast
and crew.
Over the years, Johnny McPhail has been involved as a witness in
several Yoknapatawpha County Sheriff's Department investigations.
McPhail spoke with authorities about a stalker he saw prowling around
Purity Knight's house before her 1997 abduction and subsequent murder.
In late 1999, while McPhail was working part-time as a bartender at
Clyde's Lounge, he was interviewed during the investigation into the
murder of former Yoknapatawpha County Sheriff's Detective Terrence
Nelson. In 2001, McPhail was again called upon to provide information in
an investigation when his cousin Jonah Dale's daughter, Missy Hammond,
was murdered. McPhail was never implicated in any of those cases and has
always been a cooperative witness. |
