Stephen Henderson Talbot (born February 28, 1949, Los Angeles, California, United States) is an American award-winning TV documentary producer, writer and reporter who had an earlier career as a television child actor in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His father was the veteran film, TV and stage actor Lyle Talbot.As an actor, Talbot is best known for the late 1950s through early 1960s TV series, Leave It to Beaver, in which he had the semi-regular role as, "Gilbert Bates," friend of, "Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver" (Jerry Mathers).Talbot went on to become an accomplished, Emmy Award-winning "behind the scenes" contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service, "PBS," and its Frontline and "Frontline World" television series. He has produced and written over 40 documentaries for PBS, and worked for KQED-TV in San Francisco, the PBS Newshour and the Center for Investigative Reporting.He also produces a PBS music show, "Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders," and an online series of music videos called, "Quick Hits."
In 1968, Steve was speaking at a town meeting in Connecticut against the Vietnam war, along with other SDS members and some Black Panthers. Someone in the audience asked, "Hey weren't you Gilbert on "Leave it to Beaver"? As Steve recalled, "All heads onstage turned to stare at me. One Panther from Newark lowered his shades to get a better look. I felt like an impostor - an alleged college radical exposed as a child sitcom actor."
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Fact
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Talbot won a DuPont Award from Columbia University for the first documentary he ever produced for the PBS series Frontline: "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy" (1992) about the financing of the Bush-Clinton presidential race.
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At the age of 9, after begging his reluctant parents to let him act, Steve made his professional debut in 1958, starring in "Admiral in an Outboard," an "industrial" film that was essentially an extended commercial for motorboats shot in Chicago and on Lake Oshkosh, Wisconsin. A young model, Pepe Wonso, played Steve's older sister. Changing her name to Pamela Tiffin, the beautiful young actress went on to become a leading Hollywood starlet in the '60s, co-starring with James Cagney in Billy Wilder's "One, Two, Three.".
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Briefly attended Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, California.
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Lives and works in San Francisco. He is married to Pippa Gordon and they have two grown children, Dashiell and Caitlin. From 2002-2008, Talbot was the Series Editor for Frontline/World, the PBS international news magazine. He left to form a San Francisco-based media company, The Talbot Players, with his brother, David, the founder of Salon.com. [November 2008]
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A documentary filmmaker
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Lives in San Francisco. He is married to Pippa Gordon and they have two children, Dashiell and Caitlin. Talbot is the Series Editor for Frontline/World, the international news magazine airing on the PBS series, Frontline. [February 2004]
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Steve's youngest sister, Margaret Talbot, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has written a family memoir and a biography of their father, actor Lyle Talbot, entitled, "The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century" (2012).
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Stephen Talbot was one of four producers cited in winning the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club of America for the 2004 season of the PBS series, Frontline World.
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Stephen Talbot's 1982 PBS biography of San Francisco mystery writer Dashiell Hammett won both a George Foster Peabody Award and a special "Edgar Allen Poe" Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
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In the early 1980s, producer/writer Stephen Talbot and KQED-TV San Francisco won George Foster Peabody Awards for two very different documentaries: an investigative report, "Broken Arrow: Can a Nuclear Weapons Accident Happen Here?" (1981 Peabody) and "The Case of Dashiell Hammett," a biography of the mystery writer (1983 Peabody).
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His daughter, Caitlin Talbot, is an actress in New York, having graduated from the American Conservatory of Theater in San Francisco.
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Named his son Dashiell after San Francisco mystery writer Dashiell Hammett.
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Brother of journalist Margaret Talbot, a staff writer at the New Yorker
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Brother of journalist David Talbot, editor of Salon.com.
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