Albert Dekker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Albert Dekker (December 20, 1905 – May 5, 1968) was an American character actor.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dekker made his Broadway debut in 1928. After a solid, if undistinguished, career on the stage playing both comedy and drama, he transferred to Hollywood in 1937. He spent most of the rest of his acting career in the cinema, but from time to time he returned to the stage, including a five-year stint back on Broadway in the early sixties. His three most famous screen roles were as a mad scientist in Dr. Cyclops (1940), a vicious hitman in the The Killers (1946), and The Wild Bunch (1969), as an unscrupulous railroad detective. On Broadway, he replaced Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the original production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and played the Duke of Norfolk in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.

In May of 1968, Dekker was found strangled to death in his bathtub at his home in Hollywood, California. It has been disputed that he was handcuffed and dressed in drag, while other reports state that his naked body was bound hand and foot, a hypodermic needle was jammed into each arm, and obscenities were scrawled all over the corpse. At first, it seemed that Dekker was a closet homosexual who had committed suicide (early reports suggested that the writings on his body were his bad movie reviews) or had died while having rough sex. While the kinky particulars of the case were never officially explained, it was finally ruled that Albert Dekker had died of accidental asphyxiation.(see [1]). The details may well have been censored from the general public at the time. It is unclear whether he died from suicide, as part of a sexual game, or was murdered. He had been known as a heterosexual and had a girlfriend at the time of his death, though many believe he was a closeted homosexual.