- published: 06 Dec 2010
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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 1926 silent film Men of Steel, perhaps as an extra; he is not listed in the credits. During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in a student production of "The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village." Stander's professional 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, 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 cast in a feature, Ben Hecht's The Scoundrel with Noël Coward. He moved to Hollywood and was 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, playing Archie Goodwin in Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) and The League of Frightened Men (1937), and in A Star Is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.
Shemp Howard (March 11, 1895 – November 22, 1955) was an American actor and comedian best known as a part of The Three Stooges comedy team. Born Samuel Horwitz, he was called "Shemp" because "Sam" came out that way in his mother's thick Litvak accent. He was an older brother of both Moe Howard and Curly Howard as well as the "third stooge" in the early years of the act. He would rejoin the trio in May 1946 after Curly suffered a stroke.
Shemp was born in Manhattan, New York. He was the third of the five Horwitz brothers and of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.
Moe Howard entered show business as a youngster, on stage and in films. Eventually, he and older brother Shemp tried their hands as minstrel-show-style "blackface" comedians with an act they called "Howard and Howard—A Study In Black", and even worked for a rival vaudeville circuit at the same time by appearing without makeup. By the 1920s Moe had teamed in a roughhouse act with boyhood friend-turned-vaudeville star Ted Healy. One day Moe spotted his brother Shemp in the audience, and yelled at him from the stage. Quick-witted Shemp yelled right back, and walked onto the stage. From then on, Shemp was part of the act, usually known as "Ted Healy and His Stooges". On stage, Healy would sing and tell jokes while his three noisy stooges would get in his way. Healy would retaliate with physical and verbal abuse. Healy's original stooges were the Howard brothers and Larry Fine. Shemp played a bumbling fireman in the Stooges' first film, Soup to Nuts, the only film in which he plays one of Healy's gang.
Robert John Wagner (born February 10, 1930) is an American actor of stage, screen, and television, best known for starring in the television shows It Takes a Thief (1968–70), Switch (1975–78), and Hart to Hart (1979–84). In movies, Wagner is known for his role as Number Two in the Austin Powers films (1997, 1999, 2002). He also had a recurring role as Teddy Leopold on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men.
Wagner's autobiography, Pieces of My Heart: A Life, written with author Scott Eyman, was published on September 23, 2008.
Wagner was born in Detroit, Michigan. He is the son of Hazel Alvera (née Boe), a telephone operator, and Robert John Wagner Sr., a traveling salesman who worked for the Ford Motor Company. His paternal grandparents were born in Germany. Wagner has a sister, Mary. He graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1949.
He made his film debut in The Happy Years (1950). He was signed by agent Henry Willson and put under contract with 20th Century-Fox, where he gained attention with a small but showy part as a shellshocked soldier in With a Song in My Heart (1952). This led to star roles in a series of films including Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and Prince Valiant (1954), and White Feather (1955, with Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter), A Kiss Before Dying (1956, a rare villainous role) and Between Heaven and Hell (1956).