Cec Linder

Cecil Yekuthial Linder was born on March 10, 1921, in Galicia, Poland, and died on April 10, 1992, in Toronto. He escaped Poland before the Holocaust and was raised in Timmins, Ontario, where his father served as rabbi to the local Jewish community. He went on to build a career as a film, television, and stage actor spanning several decades and accumulating more than 225 credits across productions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Linder began his professional life as a radio announcer at CKGB in Timmins before transitioning to acting. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked extensively in the United Kingdom, frequently cast as Canadian and American characters in British film and television productions. His most prominent British television role came in the BBC serial Quatermass and the Pit, broadcast from 1958 to 1959, in which he played the palaeontologist Dr. Matthew Roney. On the big screen, he appeared in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962 as Doctor Keegee, and in 1964 he portrayed CIA agent Felix Leiter, James Bond's ally, in Goldfinger.

In American television, Linder was a regular presence on the CBS soap operas The Secret Storm, where he played Peter Ames, and The Edge of Night, in which he appeared as Senator Ben Travis. He also had guest roles in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Ironside, and The Saint, among other series. In Canada, he was a regular on the 1980s crime series Seeing Things, playing Crown Attorney Spenser, and appeared in several Perry Mason revival television films during the same decade as District Attorney Jack Welles. In 1982 he portrayed Inspector Cramer in CBC radio dramatizations of Nero Wolfe short stories. His final screen work was a two-episode appearance as Syd Grady in the television series Sweating Bullets in 1991.

Linder's stage work included a Broadway appearance in 1969 in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto from complications from emphysema.