from The Times, December 6, 1994
(Many thanks to Giles, who sent this.)
Lionel Stander American character actor. Died in Los Angeles on November 30, 1994 aged 86. He was born in New York on January 11, 1908.
There was more to Lionel Stander than the gravel -voiced character actor who appeared in numerous Hollywood films, and fairly consistently on British television talk-shows in the early 1980s. He will perhaps be best remembered for his long-running role as Max in the television series Hart to Hart, playing the loveable chauffer-cum-father figure to the husband-and-wife detective team of Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner. But he was also fiercely liberal in his views and played a notable part in the political history of Hollywood.
In 1953, with the McCarthy anti-Communist witch-hunt at its height, Stander was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Unlike many witnesses who saved their careers by informing on others, Stander stood his ground and delivered a lecture to the committee on democracy and due process of law. He refused to repeat under oath his former frequent denials that he never had been a Communist. "I've always been lefter than the Left" he said later, "and I worked very closely with the Communist Party during the 1930s. But I never joined."
Stander had long been regarded with suspicion by the Hollywood moguls. He had helped to organize the Screen Actors Guild and raised money for the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War. As a result, his film career had gone into a decline long before Joe McCarthy came onto the scene.
In the 1930s, playing alongside such stars as Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper, Frederic March, Jean Arthur and Rudy Vallee, Stander had become the highest-paid character actor in the business. But form 1930 to 1963 he hardly ever worked for a major studio.
Though ostracized in Hollywood, Stander continued to act. He found work in the theatre, and went to Italy, where he appeared in comedies and spaghetti westerns. A sharp dresser and a notorious womanizer, he became the unofficial mayor of Rome's Via Veneto in his sixties when he was derided in Italian
newspapers as "the world's oldest hippie."
He was also a keen Anglophile and noted raconteur, and he became a popular guest on British television talk-shows . It was a British director, Tony Richardson, who provided him with the opportunity to return to major screen productions in The Loved One in 1965. He later appeared in Roman Polanski's Cul de sac (1966). Martin Scorses'es excellent New York, New York (1977) and Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979).
Stander began his show business career at the age of 17, after going with an actor friend to a rehearsal and volunteering as an extra for a scene involving a dice game. He had attended a wide variety of schools and never graduated from any of them. His professional stage debut was made in a provincial production of e.e. cumming's Him, and he was signed by RKO for film work in the early 1930s after appearing in radio shows with Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor and Al Johnson.
he continued to work until two weeks before his death, filming a special two hour Hart to Hart, scheduled for screening in February.
Lionel Stander was married six times. He is survived by his wife Stephana, and by five daughters.