| Luis van Rooten | |
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Luis Van Rooten on The Mysterious Traveler |
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| Born | Luis D'Antin Van Rooten November 29, 1906 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Died | June 17, 1973 (aged 66) Chatham, Massachusetts, USA |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | actor, author, translator |
| Years active | 1944-68 |
Luis van Rooten, (November 29, 1906 - June 17, 1973) was an American film actor. He was christened Luis d'Antin van Rooten.
Van Rooten earned his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an architect before deciding to pursue film work in Hollywood during World War II. His facility with languages made van Rooten an in-demand military radio announcer during the war, and he conducted a variety of broadcasts in Italian, Spanish and French. This led into film work, often in roles requiring an accent or skill with dialects.
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Known for his villainous roles, he played Nazi ringleader Heinrich Himmler in both Hitler's Madman (1943) and Operation Eichmann (1961). He played supporting roles with a wide swath of film stars, including Alan Ladd in Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and Beyond Glory (1948), Charles Laughton in The Big Clock (1948), Veronica Lake in Saigon (1948), Edward G. Robinson in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) and Kirk Douglas in Detective Story (1951). He provided the voices for both the King and the Grand Duke in Disney's animated "Cinderella."
Van Rooten found steady work doing narration in addition to acting in live television and radio dramas, such as The Mysterious Traveler. He portrayed the evil Roxor in the late 1940s revival of the radio serial Chandu the Magician. He also performed on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet (1958) and John Osborne's Luther (1963).
He is best known for his character work in films, but van Rooten was also a skilled artist and designer and the author of several sophisticated books of humor. These include Van Rooten's Book of Improbable Saints,[1] The Floriculturist's Vade Mecum of Exotic and Recondite Plants, Shrubs and Grasses, and One Malignant Parasite [2]
Van Rooten died June 17, 1973 in Chatham, Massachusetts, where he and his family had a vacation home.
Van Rooten is well known in particular for his book Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Râmes (1967), ostensibly a collection of poems by an obscure and unsung Frenchman (with translations and commentary). Van Rooten used French words and phrases which, when spoken aloud with a French accent, produce English Mother Goose rhymes, a work of homophonic translation. The following example, when spoken aloud, sounds like the opening lines to "Humpty Dumpty"[3]:
A free translation might read: