1957–1979: The Music Man and acclaim
Preston is probably best known for his performance as Professor Harold Hill in Meredith Willson's musical The Music Man (1957). He had appeared on stage, but it was his first musical. "They'd run through all the musical comedy people before they cast me", he remembered years later. He won a Tony Award for his performance.
He appeared on the cover of Time on July 21, 1958.
In 1961, Preston was asked to make a recording as part of a program by the President's Council on Physical Fitness to encourage schoolchildren to do more daily exercise. The song, Chicken Fat, composed by Meredith Willson and performed by Preston with full orchestral accompaniment, was recorded during sessions for The Music Man soundtrack. The recording was distributed by Capitol Records to elementary schools across the nation and played for students as they performed calisthenics.
In 1962, Preston starred opposite Shirley Jones in the film version of The Music Man, although, surprisingly, he was not the studio’s first choice despite his success on Broadway. Warner Brothers wanted to cast Frank Sinatra as the fast-talking Harold Hill, but playwright Willson insisted that Preston be cast.
He played an important supporting role as wagonmaster Roger Morgan, in the MGM epic How the West Was Won (1962).
In 1966, Preston was the male half of the two-character musical I Do! I Do! with Mary Martin, for which he won his second Tony Award. In 1964 he starred in the title role in the musical Ben Franklin in Paris, and he originated the role of Henry II in the stage production of The Lion in Winter, whom Peter O'Toole portrayed in the film version, receiving an Academy Award nomination. In 1974, he starred alongside Bernadette Peters in Jerry Herman's Broadway musical Mack & Mabel as Mack Sennett, the famous silent film director. That same year, the film version of Mame, another Jerry Herman musical, was released with Preston starring, alongside Lucille Ball, in the role of Beauregard Burnside.
In 1978, Preston starred in another musical that did not make it to Broadway, The Prince of Grand Street, in which he played a matinee idol of New York's Yiddish theater who refused to renounce the roles he had played in his youth, despite having aged out of them. With a libretto and songs by Bob Merrill and direction by Gene Saks, the show folded during its Boston tryout. In 1979, Preston portrayed a snake-handling family patriarch Hadley Chisholm in a CBS Western miniseries, The Chisholms, with Rosemary Harris as his wife, Minerva. The story chronicled the Chisholm family losing their land in Virginia and migrating to the west to begin a new life. When CBS continued the saga as a weekly series the following year, Preston reprised his role, but his character died in the fifth episode. The series, which also featured co-stars Ben Murphy, Brett Cullen, and James Van Patten, lasted only four more episodes after Preston's departure.
