Lionel Jay Stander (January 11, 1908 – November
30, 1994) was an American actor in movies, radio, theater and
television.
Early life and career
Lionel
Stander was born in The
Bronx
, New
York
, to Russian
Jewish immigrants, the first of three children.
According to newspaper interviews with Stander, as a teenager he
appeared in the 1926 silent film "
Men of Steel", perhaps as an extra; he
is not listed in the credits.
During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
, he appeared in a student production of "The Muse
and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village." Stander's
professional acting career began in 1928, as Cop and First Fairy in
"Him" by
e.e. cummings at the
Provincetown Playhouse. He claimed
that he got the roles because one of them required shooting craps,
which he did well, and a friend in the company volunteered him. He
appeared in a series of short-lived plays through the early 1930s,
including
The House Beautiful, which
Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play
lousy."
In 1932, Stander landed his first credited film role in the
Warner-Vitaphone short feature
In the
Dough, with
Fatty Arbuckle
and
Shemp Howard. He made several other
shorts, the last being
The Old Grey Mayor with
Bob Hope in 1935. That year, he was cast in a
feature,
Ben Hecht's
The Scoundrel with
Noel Coward. He moved to Hollywood and was
signed a contract with
Columbia
Pictures. Stander was in a string of films over the next three
years, most notably in Frank Capra's
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
with
Gary Cooper, playing
Archie Goodwin in
Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), and
A Star Is Born
(1937) with
Janet Gaynor and
Fredric March.
Stander's distinctive rumbling voice, tough-guy demeanor, and
talent with accents made him a popular radio actor. In the 1930s
and 1940s he was on the
Eddie
Cantor Show,
Bing Crosby's KMH
show, the
Lux Radio
Theater production of
A Star
Is Born,
The Fred Allen
Show, the
Mayor of the
Town series with
Lionel
Barrymore and
Agnes Moorehead,
Kraft Music Hall on NBC,
Stage Door Canteen on
CBS, the
Lincoln Highway
Radio Show on NBC, and
The Jack Paar Show, among others. In
1941 he originated the title role of
The Life of Riley on CBS, later made
famous by
William Bendix. Stander
played the role of Spider Schultz in both
Harold Lloyd's 1936 film
The Milky Way and its 1946
remake starring
Danny Kaye,
The Kid from Brooklyn. He was a
regular on
Danny Kaye's zany
comedy-variety
radio show on
CBS (1946–1947), playing himself as "just the
elevator operator" amidst the antics of Kaye,
future
Our Miss Brooks star
Eve Arden, and bandleader
Harry James.
Strongly liberal and pro-labor, Stander espoused a variety of
social and political causes, and was a founding member of the
Screen Actors Guild. At a SAG
meeting held during a 1937 studio technicians' strike, he told the
assemblage of 2000 members, "With the eyes of the whole world on
this meeting, will it not give the Guild a black eye if its members
continue to cross picket lines?" (The
NYT reported:
"Cheers mingled with boos greeted the question.") Stander also
supported the Conference of Studio Unions in its fight against the
Mob-influenced International Alliance of Stage Employees (
IATSE). Also in 1937, Ivan F. Cox, a deposed officer
of the San Francisco longshoremen's union, sued Stander and a host
of others, including union leader
Harry
Bridges, actors
Fredric March,
Franchot Tone,
Mary Astor,
James
Cagney,
Jean Muir, and director
William Dieterle. The charge,
according to
Time magazine, was "conspiring to propagate
Communism on the Pacific Coast, causing Mr. Cox to lose his
job."
In 1938, Columbia Pictures head
Harry
Cohn allegedly called Stander "a Red son of a bitch" and
threatened a $100,000 fine against any studio that renewed his
contract. Despite critical acclaim for his performances, Stander's
film work dropped off drastically. After appearing in 15 films in
1935 and 1936, he was in only six in 1937 and 1938. Then he was in
just six movies from 1939 through 1943, none made by major studios,
the most notable being
Guadalcanal
Diary (1943).
Stander and HUAC
Stander was among the first group of Hollywood actors to be
subpoenaed before the
House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1940 for supposed
Communist activities. At a grand jury hearing in
Los Angeles in August 1940--the transcript of which was shortly
released to the press--John R. Leech, the self-described former
"chief functionary" of the Communist Party in Los Angeles, named
Stander as a CP member, along with more than 15 other Hollywood
notables, including
Franchot Tone,
Humphrey Bogart,
James Cagney,
Clifford Odets and
Budd Schulberg. Stander subsequently forced
himself into the grand jury hearing, and the district attorney
cleared him of the allegations.
Stander appeared in no movies in 1944 and 1945; then, with HUAC's
attentions focused elsewhere due to World War II, he played in a
number of mostly second-rate pictures from independent studios
through the late 1940s. These include Ben Hecht's
Specter of the Rose (1946); the
Preston Sturges comedies
The Sin of Harold
Diddlebock with
Harold Lloyd
(1947) and
Unfaithfully Yours with
Rex Harrison (1948); and
Trouble
Makers with
The Bowery Boys
(1948).
HUAC returned its attention to Hollywood in 1947. That October,
Howard Rushmore, who had belonged to the CP in the 1930s and
written movie reviews for the
Daily Worker, testified that
writer
John Howard Lawson, whom
he named as a Communist, had "referred to Lionel Stander as a
perfect example of how a Communist should not act in Hollywood."
Stander was again
blacklist from
movies, though he played on TV, radio, and in the theater.
In March 1951, actor
Larry Parks, after
pleading with HUAC investigators not to force him to "crawl through
the mud" as an informer, named several people as Communists in a
"closed-door session", which made the newspapers two days later. He
testified that he knew Stander, but didn't recall attending any CP
meetings with him.
At a HUAC hearing in April 1951, actor
Marc Lawrence named Stander as a member of his
Hollywood Communist "cell", along with screenwriter
Lester Cole and screenwriter
Gordon Kahn. Lawrence testified that Stander
"was the guy who introduced me to the party line", and that Stander
said that by joining the CP, he'd "get to know the dames
more"--which Lawrence, who didn't enjoy movie-star looks, thought a
good idea. Upon hearing of this, Stander shot off a telegram to
HUAC chair John S. Wood, calling Lawrence's testimony that he was a
Communist "ridiculous" and asking to appear before the Committee,
so he could swear to that under oath. The telegram concluded: "I
respectfully request an opportunity to appear before you at your
earliest possible convenience. Be assured of my cooperation." Two
days later, Stander sued Lawrence for $500,000 for slander.
Lawrence left the country ("fled", according to Stander) for
Europe.
After that, Stander was blacklisted from TV and radio. He continued
to act in the theater, and was in a 1953 revival of
Pal Joey on Broadway and on
tour.
Blacklisting
Two years passed before Stander was issued the requested subpoena.
Finally, in May 1953, he testified at a HUAC hearing in New York,
where he made front-page headlines nationwide by being uproariously
uncooperative, memorialized in the
Eric
Bentley play,
Are You Now or Have You
Ever Been. The
New York Times headline was
"Stander Lectures House Red Inquiry." In a dig at bandleader
Artie Shaw, who had tearfully claimed in
a Committee hearing that he had been "duped" by the Communist
Party, Stander testified, "I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or
a schmoe...I was absolutely conscious of what I was doing, and I am
not ashamed of anything I said in public or private."
An excerpt from that
statement was engraved in stone for "The First Amendment Blacklist
Memorial" by Jenny Holzer at the University of
Southern California
.
Other notable statements during Stander's 1953 HUAC testimony:
- "[Testifying before HUAC] is like the Spanish Inquisition.
- You may not be burned, but you can't help coming away a little
singed."
- "I don't know about the overthrow of the government.
- This committee has been investigating 15 years so far, and
hasn't found one act of violence."
- "I know of a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to
undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving
pacifists and others of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness
without due process of law."
- "...I don't want to be responsible for a whole stable of
informers, stool pigeons, and psychopaths and ex-political
heretics, who come in here beating their breast and say, 'I am
awfully sorry; I didn't know what I was doing.
- Please--I want absolution; get me back into pictures.'"
- "My estimation of this committee is that this committee
arrogates judicial and punitive powers which it does not
possess."
Career in independent films and Europe
After that, Stander's acting career went into a free fall. He
worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street, a journeyman stage actor, a
corporate spokesman -- even a New Orleans Mardi Gras king. He
didn't return to Broadway till 1961 (and then only briefly in a
flop) and to film in 1963, in the low-budget
The Moving
Finger (although he didprovide, uncredited, the voice-over
narration for the 1961
noir thriller
Blast of Silence.)
Life improved for Stander when he moved to London in 1964 to act in
Bertolt Brecht's
St. Joan of the Stockyards,
directed by
Tony Richardson, for
whom he'd acted on Broadway, along with
Christopher Plummer, in a stillborn 1963
production of Brecht's
The Resistible Rise of Alberto
Ui. In 1965, he was featured in the film
Promise Her Anything. That same
year Richardson cast him in the
black
comedy about the funeral industry,
The Loved One, based on
the novel by
Evelyn
Waugh, with an all-star cast including
Jonathan Winters,
Robert Morse,
Liberace,
Rod Steiger,
Paul Williams and many others. In
1966,
Roman Polanski cast Stander in
his only starring role, as the thug Dickie in
Cul-de-Sac, opposite
Françoise Dorléac and
Donald Pleasence.
Stander stayed in Europe and eventually settled in Rome, where he
appeared in many
spaghetti
Westerns, most notably playing a bartender named Max in
Sergio Leone's
Once Upon a Time in the
West. In Rome he connected with
Robert Wagner, who cast him in an episode of
It Takes a
Thief that was shot there.
Stander's few English-language movies in
the 1970s include The Gang That Couldn't
Shoot Straight with Robert De
Niro and Jerry Orbach, Steven
Spielberg's 1941, and Martin Scorsese's New York, New
York
with Liza
Minnelli and Robert De
Niro.
Hart to Hart
After 15 years abroad, Stander moved back to the U.S. for the role
he is now most famous for: Max, the loyal
butler,
cook, and
chauffeur to the wealthy, amateur
detectives played by
Robert Wagner and
Stefanie Powers on the 1979–1984 television
series
Hart to Hart (and a
subsequent series of
Hart to Hart made-for-TV movies). In 1983, Stander won a
Golden Globe Award for "Best
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series,
Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV". In 1986, he became the
voice of
Kup in
Transformers: The Movie. His
final theatrical movie role was as a dying hospital patient in
The Last Good Time
(1994), with
Armin Mueller-Stahl
and
Olivia d'Abo, directed by
Bob Balaban.
Personal life
Stander's personal life was as tumultuous as his professional one.
He was married six times—always to beautiful young women, most of
them artists—the first time in 1932 and the last in 1972. All but
the last marriage ended in divorce. He fathered six daughters (one
wife had no children; one had twins), the first five of whom he
left by age three.
Stander
died of lung cancer in Los
Angeles
, California
, at age 86. He was buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn
Memorial Park Cemetery
.
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