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CASS, MAURICE (1884–1954). Lithuanian actor.
He was born in 1884 in the region that is now Lithuania, and
one can be reasonably sure that the name on his birth certificate was not
"Maurice Cass." But his original name, and other details about his upbringing
in Europe, may forever remain unknown. As a young man, he emigrated to America
and was soon making a living as an actor on Broadway, first appearing as a
mayor in a 1913 play and demonstrating, even at the age of twenty-nine, that he
would always be destined to portray older authority figures. After two decades
of supporting appearances on stage that he presumably found unsatisfying, he
migrated to Hollywood in the early 1930s to begin a long series of supporting
appearances on film that were probably just as unsatisfying, but more
remunerative.
Cass's two decades of film work were mostly a matter of
tiny, often uncredited roles—among many such appearances, you do not remember
him as the handwriting expert in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), or
the psychiatrist in Sorrowful Jones (1949)—though he garnered a rare
starring role in a 1938 short, The Magician's Daughter, as a friendly
stage magician, and credibly handled minor parts in the minor horror films Spook
Busters and Catman of Paris. But while such work paid his bills,
Cass was visibly failing to make a name for himself, and like almost everyone
who enters the profession, he undoubtedly still harbored implausible dreams
about becoming a big star, even as he approached the age of retirement, and
even as his career continued to consist of roles involving one day on the set,
delivering a few lines.
What made Cass's dreams come true—to a very limited extent—was
the new medium of television, which in the early 1950s began to offer
many stimulating opportunities to reliable veterans of the industry, rescuing
Cass from complete obscurity and elevating him to the status of relative
obscurity. One venue where Cass's talents were appreciated was The
Adventures of Superman, and while there was nothing remarkable about his
turn as a shop owner in "Mystery of the Broken Statues," he brought unusual
enthusiasm to a rare role as a villain, the sinister scientist Meldini in "The
Defeat of Superman," who devises a form of artificial kryptonite to bring down
George REEVES's Man of
Steel. He was also effective as Mickey Rooney's old chemistry teacher in an
episode of The Mickey Rooney Show, inadvertently providing his former
student with a powerful explosive to propel his planned rocket to the Moon. But
his career reached its modest peak when he finally earned, at the age of
sixty-nine, his first regular role in a television series as Professor Newton
in Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, elderly mentor to the adventurous pilot
and his crewmates. It isn't saying much, perhaps, but he was manifestly the
series' best actor, and its most commanding presence, as he effortlessly
dominated all of the episodes he appeared in, cheerfully expounding inane
science to the other explorers of space.
Unfortunately, after years of workdays that only required an
hour or so of preparing for and filming one scene, Cass was perhaps unprepared
for a regimen of all-day acting in a series that was rapidly filming
thirty-nine episodes in a few months, and he died of a heart attack while the
series' single season was still filming. It would be nice to report that the
producers, seeking to pay tribute to this unheralded yeoman of cinema, made use
of leftover footage to devise a special episode in which Professor Newton died
an heroic death, saving the galaxy from evildoers, but the reality they faced
was that scripts had already been written, and episodes needed to be completed
immediately, so they instead brought in a lesser actor to play a "Professor
Mayberry" who replaced Newton without any explanation in the final episodes.
Perhaps youthful fans at the time never noticed the difference, but as Maurice
Cass surely could not have anticipated, certain older viewers who later
discovered the series would lament his absence.
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