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STEVENS, WARREN (1919–2012). American actor.
An intelligent young man, Stevens attended
Annapolis and joined the Navy, where he absorbed useful skills—obeying orders
and looking smart in a uniform—that would come in handy for his acting career.
But his original plans for a military career were abandoned after he actually
experienced military life during World War II, and he instead resolve to become
a star. After pursuing parts in radio and on Broadway, Stevens made his way to
Hollywood at a relatively late age—his early thirties—but was seemingly
determined to make up for lost time, as he began compiling a filmography of
over 200 performances in different roles, mostly as guest stars in episodes of
innumerable television series. But he did garner an occasional job in films,
most prominently Forbidden Planet, wherein as "Doc" Ostrow he
served as Leslie NIELSEN's sidekick, nobly sacrificed himself to gain needed
knowledge about the vanished Krell, and delivered the film's most memorable
line—about "Monsters from the Id"—before dying. He was less
impressive, however, in two less impressive films, Cyborg 2087 and The
Return of Captain Nemo.
Surveying his subsequent credits in
television, one might imagine that Stevens was constantly badgering his agent
to get him a part in every science fiction series of the 1950s and 1960s, since
he only missed a few of them. But in fact, if any badgering was going on, he
was seeking to appear in every single television series on the air, period, and
his genre performances represent only a small percentage of his prodigious
onscreen labors, which also included many roles in westerns and crime dramas.
These are some of the highlights: in an episode of Science Fiction Theater,
"Time Is Just a Place," he is effectively understated as a new neighbor who is
actually a vistor from the future; in "The Riddle," an episode of One
Step Beyond, he is excellent as a man visiting India who experiences bouts
of inexplicable rage at the sight of an elderly man, who turns out to have been
his romantic rival in the reincarnated man's previous life; in
"Quarantine," an episode of Men into Space, he out-acts Simon
OAKLAND
as one of two feuding scientists doing research on a space station; in
"Keeper of the Purple Twilight," an episode of The Outer Limits,
he is a suicidal scientist who gives his emotions to an alien; and "One
Way to the Moon," an episode of The Time Tunnel, pays tribute to
his role in Forbidden Planet by again making him a spacefaring
"Doc," this time in a rocket to the Moon. Content to play mostly
subordinate roles, it is evident that Stevens was driven by no personal
Monsters from the Id. But he was the center of attention in his most famous
television performance, for an episode of Star Trek, "By Any Other
Name," where he portrayed a purportedly super-intelligent alien from the
Andromeda galaxy, vanguard for a planned invasion, who takes human form and is
easily manipulated and outsmarted by the crew of the Enterprise.
Unsurprisingly, this was the Stevens performance that was referenced in the
Fark.com link to his obituary.
In the 1980s, as Stevens entered his sixties,
the pace of his work finally slowed down, although in what was clearly
envisioned as a homage to icons of 1950s science fiction films, he did join
John AGAR, Jeff MORROW, and Kenneth
TOBEY
in an episode of Twilight Zone, "A Day in Beaumont," and after
a long hiatus he again started accepting a few roles in the twenty-first
century. Sadly, he did not live long enough to make a cameo appearance in the
long-delayed remake of Forbidden Planet—always, it seems, scheduled for release
next year—but canny use of archival footage might allow this hard-working actor
to add one more item to his seemingly interminable filmography.
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