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STEVENS, WARREN (1919– ). American actor.
An intelligent young man, Stevens attended Annapolis and
joined the Navy, where he learned the useful skills of obeying orders and
looking smart in a uniform. But bitten by the acting bug, he abandoned plans
for a life in the military and, after service in World War II, started looking
for parts in radio and on Broadway. Making his way to Hollywood at a relatively
late age—his early thirties—Stevens may have been determined to make up for
lost time, which would account for a filmography of over 200 performances in
different roles, mostly as a guest star in episodes of television series. But
he garnered 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. 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 numerous roles in westerns and crime dramas. These
are some of the highlights: 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 the role in Forbidden Planet by again
making him a spacefaring "Doc," this time in a rocket to the Moon. But his most
famous television role, inevitably, came in an episode of Star Trek, "By
Any Other Name," where as a purportedly super-intelligent alien from the
Andromeda galaxy who is the vanguard for a planned invasion, he takes human form
and is easily manipulated and outsmarted by the crew of the Enterprise. 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. If the long-planned remake of Forbidden
Planet ever gets off the ground, one hopes that the producers will invite
the surviving veterans of the original film—Stevens, Nielsen, Richard
ANDERSON, and Earl Holliman—to make an appearance. And if Warren Stevens is
given very little to do, I'm sure that, as always, he won't complain and will
do what he is asked to do, as well as he can.
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