Jonathan Harris

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Jonathan Harris in the Twilight Zone television episode Twenty-Two

Jonathan Harris (November 6, 1914 – November 3, 2002), was a stage and character actor best known for his TV work as Bradford Webster in The Third Man and Dr. Zachary Smith in Lost in Space.

Born as Jonathan Charasuchin in Bronx, New York to impoverished Russian Jewish emigrés, Harris worked in a pharmacy, and received a pharmacology degree from Fordham University. In hopes of becoming an actor, he trained himself against his Bronx accent, and changed his name to make it easier to pronounce (and perhaps to deflect anti-Semitism). In 1938, he married Gertrude Bergman, to whom he was married for 64 years. He went on to perform over 100 plays with stock companies nationwide, and first appeared on Broadway with Heart of a City in 1942, and toured with the USO in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

He first worked on live television in 1948, and made his film debut with Alan Ladd and James Mason in Botany Bay in 1953. Harris went back to television, appearing in The Third Man as Harry Lime's manservant. In 1965, he first appeared in the role of Dr. Zachary Smith in Lost in Space, where, as part of the revised format for the show (the original pilot was never broadcast), he easily stole the show from his castmates. Many of his one-liners from the Bill Dana Show (such as "Oh, the pain!") were reused in Lost in Space.

Although he is considered something of a cult icon for this role, Harris became typecast as the effete villain. In 1970, Harris played the role of another not-so-likeable villain, when he guest starred as the Bulmanian Ambassador in the Get Smart episode, "How Green Was My Valet". A more favorable guest role of Harris's was his portrayal of Charles Dickens in a 1963 episode of Bonanza. He also appeared in two 1961 episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Harris spent most of the remainder of his career as a voice actor, appearing in television commercials as well as cartoons such as The Banana Splits, My Favorite Martian, Rainbow Brite, Darkwing Duck, Happily Ever After, Problem Child, Freakazoid!, A Bug's Life, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command and Toy Story 2. He also had several cameo and guest appearances, including Zorro, Bewitched, Uncle Croc's Block and Space Academy. Harris also provided the voiceover of the Cylon character "Lucifer" on the original Battlestar Galactica series. He starred in the Saturday morning children's series, "Ark II," in the mid-seventies.

Harris reprised his role as Dr. Smith in the one-hour TV special Lost in Space Forever in 1998. However, unlike his costars in the original show (June Lockhart, Mark Goddard, Marta Kristen and Angela Cartwright) he refused to make a cameo appearance in the motion picture version of Lost in Space later that year. He announced, "I've never played a bit part in my life and I'm not going to start now!". Gary Oldman played the part of Dr. Smith in the film, but as a more genuinely menacing, and thus less likeable, character than Harris's on TV.

During the months leading up to the film's release, the Sci-Fi Channel aired Lost In Space marathons in many markets, in which each of the actors would be interviewed, snippets of which would play before commercials. (A few of these segments were filmed in 1992, when the then fledgling Sci-Fi Channel was broadcasting an episode of the show seven days a week.) In 1998, Harris appeared as a guest on the talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien, where Harris fondly reminisced about his Lost In Space days, admitting he would stay up nights thinking of new insults for the Robot because he enjoyed the interaction so much. Then, Conan had one of his characters, Pimp-Bot 5000 (a robot pimp), come onto the set, and Harris delightfully went into character as Dr. Smith and proceeded to insult Pimp-Bot, much to the enjoyment of Conan and the audience. Shying away from his usual dry and sarcastic (sometimes even self-deprecating) style, Conan confessed to Harris that he brought him on the show just to have him insult Pimp-Bot, and that the moment made his day. He admitted his fondness for Harris's character.

In late 2002, Harris and the rest of the surviving cast of the TV series were preparing for a two-hour movie entitled Lost In Space: The Journey Back Home ^{[citation needed]} . However, just before the movie was about to film, he was taken to the hospital where he had a back problem, which led to his suffering heart failure.

Harris died on November 3, 2002, in Encino, California of a blood clot to the heart, just three days before his 88th birthday. He was survived by his widow, Gertrude, and their son, Richard. He was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.