Warren Stevens

An outstanding actor at the Actors Studio, he has starred in dozens of films, numerous plays, and hundreds of television episodes. Stevens died on Tuesday, March 27, at his home in Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles), at the age of 92, as a result of respiratory arrest.

Born on November 2, 1919, in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, Warren Albert Stevens served as a pilot in the Air Force during World War II. When he returned home, he coincidentally became very close friends with Gregory Peck and Kenneth Tobey , who aroused his interest in acting, so he enrolled as a student of Elia Kazan at the Actor’s Studio in New York, where he had classmates the then very young Marlon Brando , Karl Malden and Montgomery Clift .

Kazan himself gave Stevens the opportunity to make his Broadway debut in “Sundown Beach”, followed by “Detective Story”, which remained on the scene for a long time and for which the actor was highly praised by critics. As a result of his success, Twentieth Century Fox offered him a seven-year contract.

After supporting roles in titles such as Underwater Fights , Montana Red Sky , A Stranger Calls and 4 Pages from Life , he had his first leading role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz ‘s The Barefoot Contessa , where he was Kirk Edwards, the millionaire producer who he offers a contract to María Vargas ( Ava Gardner ), after discovering her together with the director Harry Dawes ( Humphrey Bogart ) in a flamenco tablao.

Divorced in 1942 from Susan Tucker Huntington, with whom he had a son, he joined Barbara French, who gave birth to another offspring and would accompany him until his death. The truth is that due to his acting quality, he deserved to have had more luck, but his career never really took off, and he was relegated to very secondary roles.

In 1956 he played his best-remembered role, ‘Doc’ Ostrow, the lieutenant in Forbidden Planet , one of the most iconic B-series science fiction movies of the decade. In the tape, Ostrow was one of the most prominent members of the C-57D crew, which travels to the planet Altair IV to find out what happened to an expedition sent 20 years earlier.

Since then he became a regular face on the small screen, where he appeared in numerous episodes of series such as Perry Mason , Alfred Hitchcock Presents , The Untouchables , The Defenders , Gunsmoke , Bonanza , The Virginian , and many others. He went on to have three separate roles on Mission Impossible , four on Ironside and two on Falcon Crest . He also appeared in the two best-remembered classic fantasy series, The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Original Series .

Since the 1960s, he has appeared little in the cinema, and also in films of little interest. His last television work was an episode of ER , from 2006. The following year he dropped out after a supporting role in the unsuccessful film Carts .