Kurt Kasznar

Kurt Kasznar, born Kurt Servischer on August 13, 1913, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, was an Austrian-American actor whose career spanned Broadway, film, and television across four decades. He died on August 6, 1979, in Santa Monica, California, ten months after being diagnosed with cancer. His Broadway appearances ran from 1937 to 1963, and he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 1960.

Kasznar was born into a Jewish family. His father left when he was very young, and after his mother married Hungarian restaurateur Ferdinand Kasznar, Kurt took his stepfather's surname. While working as an apprentice waiter at the restaurant, he encountered director Max Reinhardt and enrolled in Reinhardt's seminars, where he studied acting, writing, and set construction. At eleven, he appeared in Der Zirkuskönig, a 1924 film shot in Vienna and the final picture made by Max Linder. He began stage work in 1931 with a performance of Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival.

In 1936 Kasznar emigrated to the United States with Reinhardt's theater company. His Broadway debut came on July 7, 1937, when he played Zebulon in the premiere of Reinhardt's production of The Eternal Road, going on to perform at least a dozen roles during the production's three-month run. In 1941 he produced a two-act Broadway musical revue, Crazy With the Heat, which ended as a financial failure. Later that year he was drafted into the United States Army, where he was trained as a cinematographer. He filmed landings on New Guinea and in the Philippines, the signing of the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri, and was among the first Army photographers to document the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During his service, Corporal Kasznar wrote and performed in a one-act play, First Cousins, which he dedicated to foreign-born American soldiers. The play was one of five works selected from a soldier-playwright competition and published in the 1943 anthology The Army Play by Play. The winning plays were performed on Broadway for the benefit of the Sailors and Soldiers Club and later staged at Hyde Park for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his 2004 study Staging the War: American Drama and World War II, scholar Albert Wertheim described First Cousins as the most effective play in the collection.

Kasznar's first major Broadway role came in the 1950 production of Samuel A. Taylor's The Happy Time, in which he played Uncle Louie. He reprised the role in the 1952 film version, earning a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. He met his second wife, actress Leora Dana, during that production; they married in 1950 and divorced in 1958. Kasznar appeared on Broadway as the director in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author during the 1955–1956 season, and in 1956 he played Pozzo in the original Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. While performing in Noël Coward's Look After Lulu in March 1959, he was simultaneously filming a television pilot for a Nero Wolfe series, in which he played the detective opposite William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. The series was intended to air on CBS in September 1959 but was cancelled after a pilot and a few episodes were completed.

Kasznar created the role of Max Detweiler in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music, which ran from 1959 to 1963, and received his Tony Award nomination for that performance. He was the only cast member who never missed a performance when the production reached its 1,000th show. He was considered for the role in the film adaptation, though it ultimately went to Richard Haydn. In 1963 he originated the role of Victor Velasco in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, which ran through 1967. He also starred in Seventh Heaven and appeared in productions of Fiddler on the Roof, playing Tevye in several stagings. In 1974–1975 he toured in John Houseman's production of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell alongside Myrna Loy, Edward Mulhare, and Ricardo Montalbán, covering 158 cities over six months. In 1978 he played Mansky in Molnár's The Play's the Thing, a performance New York Times critic Mel Gussow described as delivered with enormous authority.

Beyond the stage, Kasznar appeared in more than 80 films and television productions. His feature film credits included Lili, Kiss Me Kate, The Last Time I Saw Paris, My Sister Eileen, A Farewell to Arms, and 55 Days at Peking. On television he held a regular role as Alexander Fitzhugh in Irwin Allen's science fiction series Land of the Giants.

Kasznar's first marriage was to American heiress Cornelia Woolley, whom he married following her 1939 divorce from her second husband. Woolley, the daughter of a New York woolen merchant, was known in theater circles for her philanthropy. She died unexpectedly at home in June 1948 at age 48, while Kasznar was performing in John Houseman's Broadway production of Joy to the World. He had no known survivors at the time of his death.