Dane Clark

Dane Clark, born Bernhardt Zanvilevitz on February 26, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American character actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1935 to 1968. He later adopted the name Bernard Zanville before taking the stage name Dane Clark, which, according to Clark, was given to him by Humphrey Bogart. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons reported in 1942 that Warner Bros. had first considered the name Zane Clark before settling on Dane Clark because too many people confused Zane Clark with Jane Clark. Clark died on September 11, 1998, of lung cancer at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, and his ashes were given to his widow.

Clark's early life was shaped by the economic hardships of the Great Depression, during which he worked as a professional boxer, minor league baseball player, construction worker, and model. He graduated from Cornell University in 1936 and earned a law degree from St. John's University School of Law in Brooklyn in 1938. It was modeling that brought him into contact with people in the arts, and he described his decision to pursue acting as a way to prove that anyone could do it, having found those in theatrical circles to be snobbish. His early stage work included time with the Group Theatre in New York City.

Clark's Broadway credits began in 1935 with four productions: Dead End, Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die, and Panic. He progressed from smaller roles to more substantial ones, eventually taking over the role of George from Wallace Ford in the 1937 production of Of Mice and Men. His subsequent Broadway appearances included The Number in 1951, Fragile Fox in 1954, A Thousand Clowns in 1962, and Mike Downstairs in 1968, in which he starred. On July 1, 1955, while performing in The Shrike, lead actress Isabel Bonner suffered a brain hemorrhage and collapsed on stage. Clark ad-libbed dialogue to cover the moment before calling for the curtain to be brought down, and a film editor in the audience, Harold Cornsweet, later noted that the improvised scene moved audience members to tears.

Clark's film career began with The Pride of the Yankees in 1942, followed by an uncredited appearance in The Glass Key the same year. He signed with Warner Bros. in 1943, and his breakthrough came with Action in the North Atlantic, in which he appeared opposite Bogart. He was third-billed beneath Cary Grant and John Garfield in Destination Tokyo and appeared alongside Dennis Morgan and Eleanor Parker in The Very Thought of You, both in 1943 and 1944 respectively. He took on one of the leads in Hollywood Canteen in 1944 while most Warner Bros. stars made cameo appearances as themselves. That same year he starred in the short film I Won't Play with Janis Paige, which received the 1945 Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Two-Reel. Exhibitors voted Clark the 16th most popular star at the US box office in 1945. He also appeared in an Army Air Force training film that year, Tail Gunner, which starred Ronald Reagan, Burgess Meredith, Tom Neal, and Jonathan Hale.

Clark supported Bette Davis and Glenn Ford in A Stolen Life in 1946 before receiving top billing in the crime film Her Kind of Man that same year. He subsequently appeared in That Way with Women, Deep Valley, and Embraceable You, and was borrowed by Republic Pictures to star in Frank Borzage's Moonrise in 1948. His later film work took him to England for Highly Dangerous and to France for Gunman in the Streets, both in 1950 and 1951. He made three films for Hammer Films in Britain: The Gambler and the Lady, Murder by Proxy, and Five Days. During the 1950s, Clark was awarded life membership in the Actors Studio, becoming part of a small group of actors outside the studio's original founding members to receive that distinction.

Clark's television work began in the late 1940s and became his primary medium after the mid-1950s. He played Peter Chambers in the radio program Crime and Peter Chambers, which aired from April 6 to September 7, 1954, and co-starred as Richard Adams in the television crime drama Justice during the 1954 to 1955 season. In 1959, he reprised Bogart's role as Slate in the short-lived television series Bold Venture. His television guest appearances included episodes of Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O, Mission: Impossible, Murder She Wrote, and Police Story, on which he appeared seven times as a lieutenant in different roles. He played Lieutenant Tragg in a short-lived 1973 revival of Perry Mason and appeared in the 1976 miniseries Once an Eagle.