Lionel Stander

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Lionel Stander & "Freeway"

Lionel Jay Stander (January 11, 1908 – November 30, 1994) was an American character actor in movies, radio, theater and television.

Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children. His 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 role because he shot craps with some of the company. He appeared in a string of short-lived plays through the early 1930s, including The House Beautiful, which Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play lousy." In 1932, he landed his first 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 in his first feature, Noel Coward's The Scoundrel. He moved to Hollywood and was put under contract at Columbia Pictures. Stander acted steadily through the 1930s, most notably in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town with Gary Cooper and Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936, and A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in 1937.

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. 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).

Consequently in 1938, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn called Stander "a Red son of a bitch," and threatened a $100,000 fine against any studio that renewed his contract. 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.

Due to the foregoing, Stander appeared in no movies from 1939 to 1941; then, with HUAC's attentions focused elsewhere during World War II, he played in a number of mostly second-rate pictures from independent studios through the late 1940s. The most memorable of the lot are Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Ben Hecht's Specter of the Rose (1946), Harold Lloyd's The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) and Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours with Rex Harrison (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, testifed 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 blacklisted from movies again, though he played on TV, radio and in the theater. Actor Marc Lawrence named him as a Communist in a HUAC hearing in 1951, after which 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.

In March 1951, after pleading with HUAC investigators not to force him to "crawl through the mud" as an informer, actor Larry Parks 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 actor 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.

Two years passed before Stander was issued the requested subpoena, during which he had no movie work. 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 Jenni Holzer at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

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."

After that, Stander's acting career went into a free fall. He worked as a stock broker 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".

Life improved for Stander when he moved to London in 1964 to act in 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 Alberto Ui, also by Bertolt Brecht. The next year, Richardson broke the Hollywood blacklist for Stander by casting him in the black comedy about the funeral industry, The Loved One (film), based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh (who disavowed the movie), with an all-star cast including Jonathan Winters, Robert Morse, Liberace, Rod Steiger, Paul Williams and many others. In 1966, Roman Polanski memorably 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 Minelli and Robert De Niro.

Stander early in his career in A Star Is Born (1937)

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, fittingly, 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'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 is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.