Fred Crane (actor) Fred Crane (actor) Fred Crane, Herman Frederick Crane, (March 22, 1918 – August 21, 2008) was an American film and television actor and radio announcer. He is probably best known for his role as Brent Tarleton in the 1939 film, "Gone with the Wind", speaking the opening lines in the movie during the opening scene with Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and Stuart Tarleton (George Reeves). Crane was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1918. Along with his brothers John and Harry, he grew up on General Pershing St. and went to the MacDonough #13 and Alsace Fortier schools. His father
Gone with the Wind (novel) disgust of the Yankee woman who was seeking an Irish maid, a "Bridget". African Americans and Irish Americans are treated "in precisely the same way" in "Gone with the Wind", writes David O'Connell in his 1996 book, "The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind". Ethnic slurs on the Irish and Irish stereotypes pervade the novel, O'Connell claims, and Scarlett is not an exception to the terminology. Irish scholar Geraldine Higgins notes that Jonas Wilkerson labels Scarlett: "you highflying, bogtrotting Irish". Higgins says that, as the Irish American O'Haras were slaveholders and African Americans were held in bondage,