Lionel Stander
| Lionel Stander | |
|---|---|
Stander in Stanza 17-17 (1971)
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| Born |
January 11, 1908 The Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 30, 1994 (aged 86) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1928–1994 |
| Spouse(s) | Lucy Dietz (1928-1936; divorced; 1 child) Alice Twitchell (1938–1942; divorced) Vehanne Monteagle (1945 – 6 June 1950; divorced; 2 children) Diana Kadlec (1953–1963; divorced; 1 child) Maria Penn (1963–1967; divorced; 1 child) Stephanie Van Hennick (1971–1994; his death; 1 child) |
Lionel Jay Stander (January 11, 1908 – November 30, 1994) was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television.
Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York City, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, the first of three children.
According to newspaper interviews with Stander, as a teenager he appeared in the silent film Men of Steel (1926), perhaps as an extra, since he is not listed in the credits.
During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in the student productions The Muse of the Unpublished Writer, and The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village.
Stander's 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 (1932), with Fatty Arbuckle and Shemp Howard. He made several other shorts, the last being The Old Grey Mayor (1935) with Bob Hope in 1935. That same year, he was cast in a feature, Ben Hecht's The Scoundrel (1935), with Noël Coward. He moved to Hollywood and signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. Stander was in a string of films over the next three years, appearing most notably in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, playing Archie Goodwin in Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) and The League of Frightened Men (1937), and in A Star Is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.
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