Lionel Stander: Movies & Box Office

Lionel Jay Stander (January 11, 1908 – November 30, 1994) was an American actor, activist, and one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild whose career spanned nearly seven decades across stage, film, radio, and television. Born in the Bronx, New York City, to Russian‑Jewish parents, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a year before launching his professional acting life at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1928, where his talent for playing tough‑guys and his distinctive raspy voice began to attract notice. Throughout the 1930s he moved from New York short subjects with Vitaphone to Hollywood features, appearing in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and the original A Star Is Born (1937), and became a familiar voice on radio programs such as The Eddie Cantor Show and The Lux Radio Theater. His outspoken left‑wing politics made him a target of the House Un‑American Activities Committee; after being subpoenaed in 1940 and again in the early 1950s he was blacklisted, forcing him to relocate to Europe where he worked in spaghetti Westerns, Polanski’s Cul‑de‑Sac and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. His personal life was equally eventful, with six marriages to Lucy Dietz, Alice Twitchell, Vehanne Monteagle, Diana Radbec, Maria Penn and Stephanie Van Hennick, and he fathered six children. Despite the hardship, he continued to act on Broadway, performed as a stockbroker and even served as a Mardi Gras king before returning to the United States in the late 1970s. Stander achieved his most recognizable television role as the loyal butler Max on the popular series Hart to Hart (1979‑1984), a performance that earned him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in 1982. In the 1980s he also voiced Kup in The Transformers: The Movie and appeared in films such as The Last Good Time (1994), his final screen credit. Throughout his turbulent career he remained committed to civil liberties, famously testifying before HUAC with defi‑ant rhetoric that was later memorialized on the First Amendment Blacklist Memorial. He died of lung cancer in Los Angeles in 1994 at the age of 86, leaving behind six children and a legacy of artistic resilience and political courage.