GH’s Adam J. Harrington On His Oscar-Winning Connection
Gold Standard: Proudfoot and Harrington in 2011 (left), and after the filmmaker won his Oscar in 2024.
When Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot won his second Academy Award in February — for Best Documentary Short Subject for The Last Repair Shop — General Hospital star Adam J. Harrington (John) was cheering proudly quite literally alongside the director’s closest family members.
As it turns out, the pair first met over a decade ago when Proudfoot was a film student at the University of Southern California making a biographical short film about his grandfather called Dinner With Fred. Proudfoot wrote and directed the 2011 movie, and cast Harrington in the titular role of Fred, a young poultry scientist.
“[Proudfoot’s] grandfather was instrumental in the second World War in figuring out how to make animals more productive to feed the troops overseas and became quite known for it,” explains Harrington of the character he played, Fred Conrad. “So we met, we agreed to work together, and I got to play his grandfather as a young man. And then I actually got to do a prosthetic make-up and play him as an 80-year-old, which was a ton of fun.”
Harrington, who calls himself a “soundtrack junkie,” even attended a scoring session for Dinner With Fred, where he met Proudfoot’s USC mentor, Kris Bowers. (The Oscar-winning composer is married to GH’s former Jordan, Briana Nicole Henry.) “We did the film, and Ben and I stayed in touch,” he shares.
Bowers and Proudfoot stayed in touch, as well. They went on to work together on the short documentary A Concert is a Concerto, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2021, and then co-directed The Last Repair Shop. “The day Ben won the Oscar, I was watching it with his family at his house,” Harrington reveals. “To watch them watch their son win [what is ] now his second Oscar was incredible.”
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