Lionel Stander

The gap in this filmography is the story. Lionel Stander works steadily through the 1930s and 1940s, with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936, the poisonous press agent Matt Libby in A Star Is Born in 1937, then Hangmen Also Die! and Guadalcanal Diary in 1943, and Call Northside 777 in 1948. After that there is nothing here until The Loved One in 1965. He was one of the first Hollywood actors subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was blacklisted from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s. The seventeen empty years in the credits are that blacklist, sitting in plain sight.

He was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, openly left-wing, and equipped with a voice like a truck downshifting. The voice is why the work survived the interruption. Nobody else sounded like that, so nobody else could be hired to do what he did: the bruiser with the fast mouth, the cynic who is right, the one man in the room not intimidated.

The second career was largely European. Cul-de-sac in 1966, the innkeeper in Once Upon a Time in the West, Italian crime and western pictures including Caliber 9 and Boot Hill. Then a return to American work with The Cassandra Crossing, New York, New York and 1941, the Autobot Kup in The Transformers: The Movie, and the role that made him familiar to a new generation entirely: Max, the growling houseman on Hart to Hart, and the voice on its opening titles. He died in 1994, having worked for most of seven decades with a very large hole cut out of the middle.