Henry Brandon

Henry Brandon, born Heinrich von Kleinbach on June 8, 1912, in Berlin, German Empire, was an American film and stage character actor whose career spanned nearly six decades and encompassed more than 100 films. The son of Hildegard and Hugo R. von Kleinbach, a merchant, Brandon was brought to the United States as an infant when his parents emigrated. He studied at Stanford University, where he joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, and later trained as a theatre actor at the Pasadena Community Playhouse before making his way to Broadway.

Brandon's screen career began in 1932 with an uncredited appearance in The Sign of the Cross. His early stage work in a popular revival of the Victorian melodrama The Drunkard, in which he played the aged villain Squire Cribbs, proved consequential: producer Hal Roach, convinced by the young actor's elderly makeup, cast him as the villain Silas Barnaby in the Laurel and Hardy feature Babes in Toyland. Brandon reprised that character in Roach's Our Gang Follies of 1938. Until 1936, he had performed under his birth name; that year he adopted the professional name Henry Brandon.

Throughout his film career, Brandon was frequently cast in a wide range of ethnic roles. He played Renouf, a French Foreign Legion deserter, in the 1939 remake of Beau Geste, and portrayed Major Ruck, a British secret agent posing as an SS officer, in the 1943 film Edge of Darkness. In 1948 he appeared as Giles de Rais in Joan of Arc, and in 1953 took the role of the African tribal chieftain M'Tara in Tarzan and the She-Devil. A French army captain in Vera Cruz followed in 1954. His most celebrated film role came in 1956, when he played Scar, a Comanche chieftain and the chief villain, in John Ford's The Searchers. The following year he portrayed Jesse James in Hell's Crossroads, and in 1958 appeared as Acacius Page in Auntie Mame. Brandon returned to work with John Ford in 1961, playing an American Indian chieftain in Two Rode Together.

Television also occupied a significant portion of Brandon's later career. In 1958 he starred in the NBC anthology series Decision in the episode "The Tall Man." In 1959 he played Gator Joe in the Bourbon Street Beat episode "Woman in the River," and on October 12 of that year portrayed Jason in a television production of Euripides' Medea as part of the Play of the Week series. He appeared in two 1961 episodes of Adventures in Paradise and played Running Wolf in a 1960 episode of The Rebel. In 1965 he played the Shug chief in the pilot episode of F Troop and made a guest appearance on Honey West.

Brandon's stage work brought him to Broadway between 1941 and 1949, with credits including Boudoir, the comedy Twelfth Night, Medea, and Army Play-by-Play. He continued to return to the stage periodically throughout his career, including a New York appearance in The Lady's Not for Burning in 1957 and a Florida production of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1985. He also reprised the role of Squire Cribbs in long-running revivals of The Drunkard at the Los Angeles Press Club theatre from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, and again in the 1980s at the Hollywood Masquers Club theatre.

In his personal life, Brandon married in 1941; the marriage produced one son before ending in 1946. He subsequently maintained a long relationship with actor Mark Herron. Herron departed in the mid-1960s and briefly became the fourth husband of Judy Garland, a marriage that lasted five months before Herron returned to Brandon and remained with him until Brandon's death. Brandon spent his final years in West Hollywood and died on February 15, 1990, following a heart attack, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 77. His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at an undisclosed theatre location.