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classicfilmfan64 · 4 years

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Yes, his autograph is part of my character Actor autograph collection. I found this extensive biography online.

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, 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his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in the student productions The Muse of the Unpublished Writer, and The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village.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, MEET NERO WOLFE (1936) playing Archie Goodwin, THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN (1937), 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 starred in a short-lived radio show called The Life of Riley on CBS, no relation to the radio, film, and television character later made famous by William Bendix. Stander played the role of Spider Schultz in both Harold Lloyd's film THE MILKY WAY (1936) and its remake ten years later, THE KID FROM BROOKLYN (1946), starring Danny Kaye. 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.

Also during the 1940s, he played several characters on The Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda animated theatrical shorts, produced by Walter Lantz. For Woody Woodpecker, he provided the voice of Buzz Buzzard, but was blacklisted from the Lantz studio in 1951 and was replaced by Dal McKennon.

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 Theatrical 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 US$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. This was followed by just six films from 1939 through 1943, none made by major studios, the most notable being GUADALCANAL DIARY (1943).

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 films between 1944 and 1945. Then, with HUAC's attention 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 comedy THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (1947) with Harold Lloyd; and TROUBLE MAKERS (1948) with The Bowery Boys. One classic emerged from this period of his career, the Preston Sturges comedy UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) with Rex Harrison.

In 1947, HUAC turned its attention once again to Hollywood. That October, Howard Rushmore, who had belonged to the CPUSA in the 1930s and written film 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 blacklisted from films, 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 did not 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 would "get to know the dames more" — which Lawrence, who did not enjoy film-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 asked 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 theater roles and played Ludlow Lowell in the 1952-53 revival of Pal Joey on Broadway and on tour.

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 from 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 artists and others of life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness without due process of law ... I can tell names and cite instances and I am one of the first victims of it. And if you are interested in that and also a group of ex-fascists and America-Firsters and anti-Semites, people who hate everybody including Negroes, minority groups and most likely themselves ... and these people are engaged in a conspiracy outside all the legal processes to undermine the very fundamental American concepts upon which our entire system of democracy exists."

- "...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."

Stander was blacklisted from the late 1940s until 1965; perhaps the longest period.

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 until 1961 (and then only briefly in a flop) and to film in 1963, in the low-budget THE MOVING FINGER (although he did provide, 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 Saint Joan of the Stockyards, directed by Tony Richardson, for whom he'd acted on Broadway, along with Christopher Plummer, in a 1963 production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo 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. He played the role of the villainous mob boss in Fernando Di Leo's 1972 poliziottescho thriller CALIBER 9. 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 films in the 1970s include THE GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT (1971) with Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach, Martin Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), which also starred De Niro and Liza Minnelli, and Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979).

Stander played a supporting role in the TV film Revenge Is My Destiny with Chris Robinson. He played a lounge comic modeled after the real-life Las Vegas comic Joe E. Lewis, who used to begin his act by announcing "Post Time" as he sipped his ever-present drink.

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-television films). In 1983, Stander won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

In 1986, he became the voice of Kup in THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE. In 1991 he was a guest star in the television series Dream On, playing Uncle Pat in the episode "Toby or Not Toby". His final theatrical film 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.

Stander was married six times, 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).

Stander died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, California, in 1994 at age 86. He was buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.

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reekierevelator · 5 years

Text

The Time Has Come

John Maclean (1879 – 1923) reviews his life as he prepares to address the horde of a hundred thousand people which has gathered on Glasgow Green to hear him speak after his release from Peterhead Prison.

So here I am again. Back on the speakers’ platform; fingers twitching and mind racing.

In a few minutes I’m expected to give a rabble-rousing speech to the thousands upon thousands of people staring up at me, despite the fact that until yesterday I was languishing in the sewer called Peterhead Jail, despite the fact I’d been on hunger strike for eight months. But I’ll manage it. I will do it, just as I did it after prison the last time, 1916. For even now that the war is over there are still too many who don’t understand, who aren’t yet class conscious, who can’t see through the fog of capitalism. I will do it because however weak I am today, I am no longer being force-fed twice daily through rubber tubes.

I can hardly believe it’s only 1919. The trial seems such a long time ago. But it was really only a year ago. I was fit and robust then. I conducted my own defence. I spoke from the dock for an hour and a half, logically rebutting in turn each of the trumped up charges they laid against me. Defence of the Realm Act indeed. Then as now I said I wished no harm to any human being; that all my actions were entirely humanitarian in nature. But they insisted I was a threat to society, that I should be keen to kill my fellow workers in other countries, that I should be more patriotic. Patriotism - the last refuge of those scoundrels; Dr Johnson was right. And maybe it’s true that I did try to undermine their war effort, their drive to slaughter millions. I tried, just as my friends Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg did in Germany. I was convicted of sedition, of trying to bring down the state, and sentenced to five years in the Peterhead hellhole. But now that the war has ended, I’m not such a threat, and in response to public clamour they set me free.

Was it all worth it? I suppose I should be grateful to have avoided the fate of my Edinburgh friend. James wanted to bring trade unionism and socialism to another part of the United Kingdom, the Ireland of his father and forefathers. Connolly was brought up among those Irish immigrants crammed into the caves under the arches of the city’s South Bridge. After fighting for workers’ rights against the Dublin lock-out he founded his Citizens’ Army. And in 1916, for his trouble, he ended up severely wounded, dragged up against a wall in Dublin Castle, and shot dead by soldiers. But I’m sure this country will find that’s not the end of the Irish story. Maybe that’s something Maybe that’s what I should tell them.

I still have my friends in Glasgow - Jimmy Maxton, Guy Aldred, and Willie Gallacher Jimmy’s the clever one. One day someone will probably write a doctoral thesis on Maxton’s thinking and end up as Prime Minister. And Guy, like me, he’s seen his fair share of courtrooms. America saw its way to amend its constitution with a Bill of Rights in 1791. But poor old Britain had to wait for Guy to be repeatedly arrested on this very Glasgow Green, for making speeches and gathering crowds, before the courts eventually agreed that public free speech, public meetings, and public processions really ought to be part of everyone’s civil liberties. And Willie, he’s seen the inside of prisons too, Willie still guides the unions, leading the Shop Stewards Movement on the Clyde. But he’s left his syndicalism behind, thrown in his lot with Lenin and Trotsky and founded the Communist Party of Great Britain. One of these days I can see him in Parliament, a Communist MP.

Looking at this huge crowd of people eagerly waiting to hear me speak I know many campaigned relentlessly for my release from prison. And now they expect a victorious call to arms, a vibrant, revolutionary speech, all fire and brimstone. They want to greet a Scottish Lenin at the Central Station rather than the Finland Station. But the prison regime has exhausted me and destroyed my body. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t known hardship before, growing up in the poverty in Pollockshaws where my Gaelic speaking parents had landed up after being forced off their Highland land. In school they called me a lad o’ pairts, a clever wee boy. The Free Kirk arranged for me to be trained as a teacher. And after that I went on to Glasgow University and took my MA in Economics. But it was the terrible housing, poverty, and illness I saw all around me that drove me to a proper understanding of economics from a socialist perspective. It’s seventy years since Engels, in Manchester but writing in German, found himself forced to describe the awful condition of the working class. And fifty since Marx wrote about the Highland Clearances. Yet sometimes it’s hard to see that very much has changed.

Of course, when I started to speak in public about the need for reform, the need to redress the terrible ills of society, I was sacked from my teaching job. Then they barred me from teaching in schools altogether. Nothing daunted, I founded the Scottish Labour College to teach people about socialist economics. I espoused the co-operative movement. I got the Renfrewshire Co-op to push local school boards into providing facilities for adult education, economics education. During the war I did what I could to support Mary Barbour and the women’s fight against the rent increases, imposed by absentee landlords while their conscripted husbands were away fighting in France. Aye, one of these days they’ll put up a statue to that wonderful woman.

And now Willie Gallacher and the Clydeside workers have decided they have to strike again. Trying to reduce working hours to a forty hour week. And it’s not that they want the same pay for fewer hours. They’ll take a bit less pay. All they want is to make some room in the yards to give jobs to all the unemployed demobbed soldiers. But in Parliament they fear an uprising, a Glasgow Soviet, a Soviet Scotland. Churchill’s tanks are even now being marshalled in the Gallowgate. Thousands of English troops are arriving by train. Meanwhile, the Scottish troops are confined to barracks in Maryhill. And if Willie speaks to them at Maryhill he knows the troops will come out for him. Revolution is in the air. But I’ve told him, that kind of battle – workers in khaki killing other workers in khaki – that’s not for me, not what I want to see. If there are to be tanks on Sauchiehall Street they must be faced down without bloodshed. But can I convince this heaving crowd of that?

Like me, most of the people here couldn’t see what the so-called ‘war to end wars’ was all about, why everyone had to starve or die because of it. Just one imperial power slaughtering the workers of another imperial power as they tried to gain a bigger slice of the cake, the wealth of the exploited colonies, for the benefit of their own capitalist classes.

The Russian workers couldn’t understand it either. We all cheered when they abandoned the war in 1917 and overthrew their government. I well remember chairing the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. And then Lenin appointed me Bolshevik Consul in Scotland. I hear they’ve even named a street after me in St Petersburg, or Leningrad as they’re calling it nowadays. There’s even been talk of carving my name on the Kremlin’s walls. But what do those things matter – his ribbon, star, and a’ that?

I’m thirty-nine and feeling nearer ninety. The force-feeding when I went on hunger strike in prison didn’t help. Some even say they tried to poison me. Now they tell me pneumonia is setting in – that I’ll probably be dead in a year or two. People might remember me for a while, before I’m eclipsed by others; Scottish people better able to fight for socialism and independence, people who understand the true nature of Scotland. If my funeral attracts as big a crowd as the one before me now it will be the biggest funeral Glasgow has ever seen. Maybe I’ll be a footnote in some socialist history of Scotland, or someone might write a song, a poem, or a play about me. My dear wee daughter Nan says she’ll write a book about me. A hundred years from now will anyone read that passionate speech I made from the dock? Will that speech’s prediction – of another world war twenty years from now - prove true or false? Will the egalitarian principles I've lived and fought for ever really be able to establish themselves in an independent Scotland? Marx said capitalism forces companies to compete, to exploit resources and labour, and the devil take the hindmost. The losers are taken over, merged, or eliminated altogether, whatever the cost to the workers. Eventually there will be huge companies, but there won’t be many. I suspect, as Marx predicted, that companies will become global, capitalists billionaires, and the gap between rich and poor will only widen. Could an independent socialist Scotland really stand in their way?

Ach, so I lost my safe middle-class teaching career, I lost my health. I gained a prison record. Have all those things really been for nothing? - But good grief, what kind of self-serving question is that for me to be asking myself?

Oh dear, the Convener is nodding towards me now. It’s time to get up on the old hind legs and give this multitude some eloquent words to chew over. Maybe their reaction will provide the answer to some of the questions tickling my brain.

#Reekie Revelator #short story #imaginary monologue #scotland #independence #socialism #john maclean (1879 - 1923)

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