Lionel Stander(1908-1994)
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Lionel Stander, the movie character actor with the great gravelly
voice, was born on January 11th, 1908 in The Bronx borough of New York
City. Stander's acting career was derailed when he was blacklisted
during the 1950s after being exposed as a Communist Party member during
the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In his own HUAC
testimony in May 1953, Stander denounced HUAC's use of informers,
particularly those with mental problems.
Stander specialized in playing lovable hoodlums and henchmen and
assorted acerbic, hard-boiled types. His physique was burly and
brutish, and his head featured a square-jaw beneath a coarse-featured
pan that was lightened by his charm. But it was his gruff, foghorn
voice that made his fortune.
Stander attended the University of North Carolina, but after making his
stage debut at the age of 19, he decided to give up college for acting.
Along with a successful stage career, his unusual voice made him ideal
for radio. His movie screen debut was in the comedy short
Salt Water Daffy (1933) with
Jack Haley and
Shemp Howard. He went on to star in a
number of two-reel comedy shorts produced at Vitaphone's Brooklyn
studio before moving to Hollywood in 1935, where he appeared as a
character actor in many A-list features such as
Nothing Sacred (1937).
John Howard Lawson, the screenwriter
who was one of the Hollywood Ten and who served as the Communist
Party's cultural commissar in Hollywood, held up Stander as the model
of a committed communist actor who enhanced the class struggle through
his performances. In the movie
No Time to Marry (1938), which
had been written by Party member
Paul Jarrico, Stander had whistled a few
bars of the "Internationale" while waiting for an elevator.
Stander thought that the scene would be cut from the movie, but it
remained in the picture because "they were so apolitical in Hollywood
at the time that nobody recognized the tune".
Stander had a long history of supporting left-wing causes. He was an
active member of the Popular Front from 1936-39, a broad grouping of
left-wing organizations dedicated to fighting reactionaries at home and
fascism abroad. Stander wrote of the time, "We fought on every front
because we realized that the forces of reaction and Faciscm fight
democracy on every front. We, too, have been forced, therefore, to
organize in order to combat them on every front: politically through
such organizations as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee;
economically through our guilds and unions; socially, and culturally
through such organizations as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League."
The Front disintegrated when the U.S.S.R. signed a non-aggression pact
with Nazi Germany, which engendered World War II by giving the Nazis
the get-go to invade Poland (with the Soviet Union invading from the
East). The Communist Party-USA dropped out of the Front and from
anti-Nazi activities, and during the early days of the War, before
Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, it tried to hamper US
support for the UK under the aegis of supporting "peace," including
calling strikes in defense plants. Many communists, such as Elia Kazan,
dropped out of the Party after this development, but many others
stayed. These were the Stalinists that the American non-communist left
grew to despise, and eventually joined with the right to destroy,
though much of their antipathy after 1947-48 was generated by a desire
to save themselves from the tightening noose of reaction.
Melvyn Douglas, a prominent liberal whose
wife Helen Gahagan Douglas would later be
a U.S. Representative from California (and would lose her bid for the
Senate to a young Congressman named
Richard Nixon, who red-baited her as "The
Pink Lady"), had resisted Stander's attempts to recruit him to the
Party. "One night, Lionel Stander kept me up until dawn trying to sell
me the Russian brand of Marxism and to recruit me for the Communist
Party. I resisted. I had always been condemnatory of totalitarianism
and I made continual, critical references to the U.S.S.R. in my
speeches. Members of the Anti-Nazi League would urge me to delete these
references and several conflicts ensued."
Douglas, his wife, and other liberals were not adverse to cooperating
with Party members and fellow travelers under the aegis of the MPDC,
working to oppose fascism and organize relief for the Spanish Republic.
They believed that they could minimize Communist Party influence, and
were heartened by the fact that the Communists had joined the liberal,
patriotic, anti-fascist bandwagon. Their tolerance of Communists lasted
until the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. That, and the invasion of
Poland by the Nazis and the USSR shattered the Popular Front.
Stander had been subpoenaed by the very first House Un-American
Activities Committee inquisition in Hollywood, in 1940, when it was
headed by Texas Congressman Martin Dies. The Dies Committee had
succeeded in abolishing the Federal Theatre Project of the Works
Progress Administration as a left-wing menace in 1939 (the FTP had put
on a revival of Lawson's play about the exploitation of miners,
"Prcessional," that year in New York). The attack on the FTP had been
opposed by many liberals in Hollywood. Stung by the criticisms of
Hollywood, the Dies Committee decided to turn its attention on
Hollywood itself.
Sending investigators to Hollywood, Dies' HUAC compiled a long-list of
subversives, including Melvyn Douglas. John L. Leech, a police agent
who had infiltrated the Communist Party before being expelled in 1937,
presented a list of real and suspected communists to a Los Angeles
County grand jury, which also subpoenaed Stander. The testimony was
leaked, and the newspapers reported that Stander, along with such
prominent Hollywood liberals as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Frederic
March and Francot Tone, had been identified as communists.
Committee chairman Dies offered all of the people named as communists
the opportunity to clear themselves if they would cooperate with him in
executive session. Only one of the named people did not appear, and
Stander was the only one to appear who was not cleared. Subsequently,
he was fired by his studio, Republic Pictures.
Stander was then subpoenaed to testify before the California Assembly's
Committee on Un-American Activities, along with John Howard Lawson, the
union leader John Sorrell and others. During the strike led by
Sorrell's militant Conference of Student Unions against the studios in
1945, Stander was the head of a group of progressives in the Screen
Actors Guild who supported the CSU and lobbied the guild to honor its
picket lines. They were outvoted by the more conservative faction
headed by Robert Montgomery, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. The SAG
membership voted 3,029 to 88 to cross the CSU picket-line.
Stander continued to work after being fired by Republic. He appeared in
Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a
film about the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated by
anti-fascists. After the bitter CSU strike, which was smeared as being
communist-inspired by the studios, HUAC once again turned its gaze
towards Hollywood, starting two cycles of inquisitions in 1947 and
1951. The screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who set a record by naming 155
names before the the second round of Committee hearings, testified that
Stander had introduced him to the militant labor union leader Harry
Bridges, long suspected of being a communist, whom Stander called
"comrade".
After being blacklisted, Stander worked as a broker on Wall Street and
appeared on the stage as a journeyman actor. He returned to the movies
in Tony Richardson's
The Loved One (1965), and he began
his career anew as a character actor, appearing in many films,
including Roman Polanski's
Cul-de-sac (1966) and
Martin Scorsese's
New York, New York (1977).
Other movies he appeared in included
Promise Her Anything (1966),
The Black Bird (1975),
The Cassandra Crossing (1976),
1941 (1979),
Cookie (1989) and
The Last Good Time (1994), his
final theatrical film.
Stander is best remembered for playing Max on TV's
Hart to Hart (1979) (1979-84)
with Robert Wagner and
Stefanie Powers, a role he reprised in a
series of "Hart to Hart" TV movies. Stander also appeared on Wagner's
earlier TV series
It Takes a Thief (1968) and
on the HBO series Dream On (1990).
Lionel Stander died of lung cancer on November 30, 1994 in Los Angeles,
California. He was 86 years old.
voice, was born on January 11th, 1908 in The Bronx borough of New York
City. Stander's acting career was derailed when he was blacklisted
during the 1950s after being exposed as a Communist Party member during
the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In his own HUAC
testimony in May 1953, Stander denounced HUAC's use of informers,
particularly those with mental problems.
Stander specialized in playing lovable hoodlums and henchmen and
assorted acerbic, hard-boiled types. His physique was burly and
brutish, and his head featured a square-jaw beneath a coarse-featured
pan that was lightened by his charm. But it was his gruff, foghorn
voice that made his fortune.
Stander attended the University of North Carolina, but after making his
stage debut at the age of 19, he decided to give up college for acting.
Along with a successful stage career, his unusual voice made him ideal
for radio. His movie screen debut was in the comedy short
Salt Water Daffy (1933) with
Jack Haley and
Shemp Howard. He went on to star in a
number of two-reel comedy shorts produced at Vitaphone's Brooklyn
studio before moving to Hollywood in 1935, where he appeared as a
character actor in many A-list features such as
Nothing Sacred (1937).
John Howard Lawson, the screenwriter
who was one of the Hollywood Ten and who served as the Communist
Party's cultural commissar in Hollywood, held up Stander as the model
of a committed communist actor who enhanced the class struggle through
his performances. In the movie
No Time to Marry (1938), which
had been written by Party member
Paul Jarrico, Stander had whistled a few
bars of the "Internationale" while waiting for an elevator.
Stander thought that the scene would be cut from the movie, but it
remained in the picture because "they were so apolitical in Hollywood
at the time that nobody recognized the tune".
Stander had a long history of supporting left-wing causes. He was an
active member of the Popular Front from 1936-39, a broad grouping of
left-wing organizations dedicated to fighting reactionaries at home and
fascism abroad. Stander wrote of the time, "We fought on every front
because we realized that the forces of reaction and Faciscm fight
democracy on every front. We, too, have been forced, therefore, to
organize in order to combat them on every front: politically through
such organizations as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee;
economically through our guilds and unions; socially, and culturally
through such organizations as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League."
The Front disintegrated when the U.S.S.R. signed a non-aggression pact
with Nazi Germany, which engendered World War II by giving the Nazis
the get-go to invade Poland (with the Soviet Union invading from the
East). The Communist Party-USA dropped out of the Front and from
anti-Nazi activities, and during the early days of the War, before
Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, it tried to hamper US
support for the UK under the aegis of supporting "peace," including
calling strikes in defense plants. Many communists, such as Elia Kazan,
dropped out of the Party after this development, but many others
stayed. These were the Stalinists that the American non-communist left
grew to despise, and eventually joined with the right to destroy,
though much of their antipathy after 1947-48 was generated by a desire
to save themselves from the tightening noose of reaction.
Melvyn Douglas, a prominent liberal whose
wife Helen Gahagan Douglas would later be
a U.S. Representative from California (and would lose her bid for the
Senate to a young Congressman named
Richard Nixon, who red-baited her as "The
Pink Lady"), had resisted Stander's attempts to recruit him to the
Party. "One night, Lionel Stander kept me up until dawn trying to sell
me the Russian brand of Marxism and to recruit me for the Communist
Party. I resisted. I had always been condemnatory of totalitarianism
and I made continual, critical references to the U.S.S.R. in my
speeches. Members of the Anti-Nazi League would urge me to delete these
references and several conflicts ensued."
Douglas, his wife, and other liberals were not adverse to cooperating
with Party members and fellow travelers under the aegis of the MPDC,
working to oppose fascism and organize relief for the Spanish Republic.
They believed that they could minimize Communist Party influence, and
were heartened by the fact that the Communists had joined the liberal,
patriotic, anti-fascist bandwagon. Their tolerance of Communists lasted
until the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. That, and the invasion of
Poland by the Nazis and the USSR shattered the Popular Front.
Stander had been subpoenaed by the very first House Un-American
Activities Committee inquisition in Hollywood, in 1940, when it was
headed by Texas Congressman Martin Dies. The Dies Committee had
succeeded in abolishing the Federal Theatre Project of the Works
Progress Administration as a left-wing menace in 1939 (the FTP had put
on a revival of Lawson's play about the exploitation of miners,
"Prcessional," that year in New York). The attack on the FTP had been
opposed by many liberals in Hollywood. Stung by the criticisms of
Hollywood, the Dies Committee decided to turn its attention on
Hollywood itself.
Sending investigators to Hollywood, Dies' HUAC compiled a long-list of
subversives, including Melvyn Douglas. John L. Leech, a police agent
who had infiltrated the Communist Party before being expelled in 1937,
presented a list of real and suspected communists to a Los Angeles
County grand jury, which also subpoenaed Stander. The testimony was
leaked, and the newspapers reported that Stander, along with such
prominent Hollywood liberals as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Frederic
March and Francot Tone, had been identified as communists.
Committee chairman Dies offered all of the people named as communists
the opportunity to clear themselves if they would cooperate with him in
executive session. Only one of the named people did not appear, and
Stander was the only one to appear who was not cleared. Subsequently,
he was fired by his studio, Republic Pictures.
Stander was then subpoenaed to testify before the California Assembly's
Committee on Un-American Activities, along with John Howard Lawson, the
union leader John Sorrell and others. During the strike led by
Sorrell's militant Conference of Student Unions against the studios in
1945, Stander was the head of a group of progressives in the Screen
Actors Guild who supported the CSU and lobbied the guild to honor its
picket lines. They were outvoted by the more conservative faction
headed by Robert Montgomery, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. The SAG
membership voted 3,029 to 88 to cross the CSU picket-line.
Stander continued to work after being fired by Republic. He appeared in
Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a
film about the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated by
anti-fascists. After the bitter CSU strike, which was smeared as being
communist-inspired by the studios, HUAC once again turned its gaze
towards Hollywood, starting two cycles of inquisitions in 1947 and
1951. The screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who set a record by naming 155
names before the the second round of Committee hearings, testified that
Stander had introduced him to the militant labor union leader Harry
Bridges, long suspected of being a communist, whom Stander called
"comrade".
After being blacklisted, Stander worked as a broker on Wall Street and
appeared on the stage as a journeyman actor. He returned to the movies
in Tony Richardson's
The Loved One (1965), and he began
his career anew as a character actor, appearing in many films,
including Roman Polanski's
Cul-de-sac (1966) and
Martin Scorsese's
New York, New York (1977).
Other movies he appeared in included
Promise Her Anything (1966),
The Black Bird (1975),
The Cassandra Crossing (1976),
1941 (1979),
Cookie (1989) and
The Last Good Time (1994), his
final theatrical film.
Stander is best remembered for playing Max on TV's
Hart to Hart (1979) (1979-84)
with Robert Wagner and
Stefanie Powers, a role he reprised in a
series of "Hart to Hart" TV movies. Stander also appeared on Wagner's
earlier TV series
It Takes a Thief (1968) and
on the HBO series Dream On (1990).
Lionel Stander died of lung cancer on November 30, 1994 in Los Angeles,
California. He was 86 years old.