Alfred Ryder

Alfred Ryder, born Alfred Jacob Corn on January 5, 1916, in New York, New York, was an American actor and director who worked across stage, television, film, and radio. He died on April 16, 1995, of liver cancer at the Actors Home in New Jersey, where he had been living in his final years. His elder sister was actress Olive Deering, with whom he eventually shared a home before his death.

Ryder began performing at the age of eight and later trained under Robert Lewis and Lee Strasberg, ultimately becoming a life member of The Actors Studio. During the 1930s and 1940s he balanced Broadway appearances with prominent radio work, playing Molly Goldberg's son Sammy on The Goldbergs and Carl Neff on Easy Aces during the Golden Age of Radio. His military service during World War II included appearing in the Air Force's Broadway production and film Winged Victory. Following the war, he signed a one-year film contract with Paramount in 1946 and took a substantial role as an undercover cop in the Anthony Mann-directed film noir T-Men in 1947.

Throughout the 1940s, Ryder pursued an ambitious course in classical theater, joining the American Repertory Theatre, founded by Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne, and subsequently Webster's Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company, with which he toured in the role of Hamlet. He harbored a sustained ambition to be regarded as the definitive Hamlet of his generation. His Broadway appearances during this period included productions of One More River, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Julius Caesar, among others, with his stage career spanning from 1938 to 1961.

In 1956, Atlantic Records released the spoken-word album This Is My Beloved, featuring Ryder reciting the poetry of Walter Benton. Two years later, he was selected as Laurence Olivier's standby when The Entertainer transferred from London to Broadway in 1958. That same year he married actress Kim Stanley, a fellow Actors Studio member, a union that lasted until 1964 and produced a daughter, Laurie Ryder, who became a California pediatrician and child advocate. Ryder won the 1959 Obie Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of D.H. Lawrence in Tennessee Williams' one-act play I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix. On the night of the awards presentation, hosted by Stanley, Ryder was absent from the ceremony, having been cast as a rush replacement for an ailing Jason Robards, Jr. in the role of Claggart in a CBS television adaptation of Billy Budd. He directed Stanley in the 1961 Broadway production A Far Country, which became a hit.

Also in 1961, Ryder was cast as the first replacement for Eli Wallach in the role of Bérenger in the Broadway production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, a part that had been originated in London by Olivier. He subsequently toured in the role alongside Zero Mostel, who had won a Tony Award for his performance in the production's other starring role. In 1964, producer Joseph Papp cast the forty-eight-year-old Ryder in a high-profile Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, fulfilling his long-held ambition. The production opened on June 16 and was broadcast on CBS, but Ryder was replaced the following day by Robert Burr, who was at the time understudying Richard Burton in the same role on Broadway. Press reports attributed the replacement to laryngitis, though co-star Stacy Keach later described erratic performances and difficulty with lines during rehearsals. Actress Lee Grant characterized the televised nature of the performance and Papp's subsequent public refusal to allow Ryder to return to the role as having ruined his stage career. Ellen Adler, daughter of acting coach Stella Adler, described the disappointment as acute. Ryder never again performed on or off-Broadway, though he went on to direct two Broadway productions: The Exercise in 1968 and a 1971 staging of The Dance of Death, both of which closed within a week of opening. He also directed for UCLA's Theatre Group, for the U.S. government's Educational Laboratory Theatre Project, and served as artistic director of the Los Angeles Free Shakespeare Festival.

Ryder's television work was extensive, encompassing more than one hundred appearances. His theatrical style and vaguely Germanic accent suited the science fiction, spy, and fantasy genres popular during the 1960s. He appeared in multiple episodes of The Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and played the recurring alien leader Mr. Nexus across two seasons of The Invaders from 1967 to 1968. On September 8, 1966, he appeared in "The Man Trap," the first-aired episode of Star Trek, as a scientist concealing a shapeshifting alien posing as his deceased wife. He guest-starred in two episodes of Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as the ghost of a World War I German captain, and appeared in the Land of the Giants episode "Night of Thrombeldinbar" in February 1969 as an orphanage operator named Parteg. An earlier television credit included the Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond episode "The Devil's Laughter" in 1959, in which he starred as a British criminal who could not be killed. He later appeared in an episode of Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected in 1977.

His film appearances were less frequent. His most prominent screen role came in True Grit in 1969, in which he played the defense attorney who cross-examines John Wayne. By the 1970s his screen credits had diminished. In 1979 he appeared on Steve Allen's PBS program Meeting of Minds, playing Machiavelli, and co-directed two episodes of the series. His final screen appearance came in 1980, when he played restaurateur Mike Romanoff in the Humphrey Bogart biographical film Bogie.