Elisha Cook

Elisha Vanslyck Cook Jr. was born on December 26, 1903, in San Francisco, California, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. The son of journalist and sometime playwright Elisha Vanslyck Cook Sr. and actress Helen Roslyn Henry, Cook began his connection to the theater early, selling programs in theater lobbies before taking to the stage himself. By the age of 14 he was performing in vaudeville and stock productions. He attended St. Albans School for Boys in Sycamore, Illinois, completing three years of high school there.

Cook's Broadway career stretched from 1926 to 1963 and encompassed productions including the musical Hello, Lola, the musical Merry-Go-Round, the play Privilege Car, Gertie, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, among others. In 1933, Eugene O'Neill selected him to originate the role of Richard Miller in Ah, Wilderness, a production that ran on Broadway for two years.

In 1930, Cook traveled to California and made his film debut in Her Unborn Child, directed by Albert Ray and produced by Windsor Picture Plays Inc. At Twentieth Century-Fox, he established himself in a series of collegiate and bookish roles, beginning with the musical comedy Pigskin Parade in 1936, in which he played a bespectacled college freshman with radical ideas. He reprised a similar type in the unofficial sequel Life Begins in College the following year. After two years at Fox, Cook began freelancing at other studios while returning to Fox periodically, appearing as a songwriter in the Alice Faye and Betty Grable musical Tin Pan Alley in 1940 and as a mobster disguised as an old woman in the Laurel and Hardy feature A-Haunting We Will Go in 1942. His role as a meek screenwriter in the Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin in 1941 was representative of his earlier, mild-mannered screen persona.

That same year, director John Huston cast Cook against type as Wilmer Cook, a bug-eyed, baby-faced killer in the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. The role transformed his career, leading to a long succession of parts as weaklings, sadistic losers, and hoodlums whose characters typically met violent ends. Among his most noted subsequent performances were the doomed informant Harry Jones in The Big Sleep in 1946, the henchman Marty Waterman in Born to Kill in 1947, the pugnacious ex-Confederate soldier Stonewall Torrey who is shot down by Jack Palance in Shane in 1953, and the cuckolded husband George Peatty in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing in 1956. He also appeared in Universal's Phantom Lady in 1944, received strong notices for his portrayal of a homicidal disc jockey in The Falcon's Alibi in 1946, and had a substantial uncredited role as Bobo in the 1953 film noir I, the Jury. Later film credits include House on Haunted Hill, One-Eyed Jacks, Rosemary's Baby, Blacula, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Tom Horn, among many others.

Cook enlisted in the United States Army in Los Angeles on August 15, 1942. His enlistment record noted his height as five feet five inches and his weight as 123 pounds.

His television work was equally extensive, spanning from the early 1950s through the late 1980s. He played private detective Homer Garrity in the Adventures of Superman episode "Semi-Private Eye," which aired on January 16, 1954, and guest-starred on NBC's The Dennis Day Show that April. He made two appearances on the CBS courtroom drama Perry Mason, playing Art Crowley in 1958 and Reelin' Peter Rockwell in 1964. He portrayed lawyer Samuel T. Cogley in the 1967 Star Trek episode "Court Martial," appeared as Isaac Isaacson on the Batman television series, and played Weasel Craig in Salem's Lot. He held a recurring role as Honolulu crime lord Ice Pick on CBS's Magnum, P.I., one of his most sustained television commitments. Additional television appearances included The Real McCoys, The Rebel, The Wild Wild West, The Fugitive, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Odd Couple, Mannix, The Bionic Woman, The A-Team, and Alf, the latter among his final roles before he retired from acting in 1988.

Cook was married to singer Mary Gertrude Dunckley, known professionally as Mary Lou Cook of the vocal quartet The Merry Macs, from 1928 until their divorce on November 4, 1941. He subsequently married Illinois native Elvira Ann McKenna in 1943. The two divorced in Inyo County, California, in February 1968, remarried on December 30, 1971, and remained together until Peggy's death on December 23, 1990. His 1942 army enlistment record lists his marital status as divorced with dependents, though various sources state he had no children.

Cook lived for many years in Bishop, California, and spent summers at Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada. John Huston recalled that between film assignments Cook lived alone in a High Sierra cabin, tying flies and fishing for golden trout, and that the studio would send a courier to retrieve him when a role required his presence. Cook died of a stroke on May 18, 1995, at a nursing home in Big Pine, California, at the age of 91. He was the last surviving member of the principal cast of The Maltese Falcon.