American actor, a boyish looking red head who played in some 125 films in the ’40s and ’50s. At 18, he arrived in New York, a star-struck kid with $5 in his pocket and a straw suitcase containing all his worldly possessions. He danced in the chorus line in a couple of theater shows and the spotlight always found his 6’1″ (1.85 m) frame. At 25, he went to Hollywood and visited his former dancing pal, Lucille Ball. A casting director screen-tested Johnson, and he was immediately signed to an MGM film contract.
In the ’50s, he spent more time on the stage than in film with a hiatus in 1962 and again in 1964 for malignant melanomas. As his career faded, he found his best life period in playing dinner theater. In 1988 he said he had been celibate for ten years and was living quietly and happily, painting and taking care of a few stray cats.
An unabashedly happy man, he began seriously working as an amateur painter in the ’40s and by the ’80s, was splashing his sunny disposition across canvas, exhibiting 63 paintings in a Dallas art show in December 1987. His works were ranging in price from $1-to-10 thousand, “honest, bright, full of giving, open, bold acrylics.”
In 1947 he married Eve Wynn; one daughter. They separated in 1961 and had an ugly divorce in 1968 that wiped him out financially and emotionally. Eve published a statement after her death in 2004 at age 90 that MGM had engineered their marriage to cover up Johnson’s homosexuality. “They needed their ‘big star’ to be married to quell rumors about his sexual preferences and unfortunately, I was ‘It’—the only woman he would marry.” Van Johnson died at age 92 on 12 December 2008 in Nyack, New York.
Link to Wikipedia biography