Peter Brocco

Carl Peter Brocco was born on January 16, 1903, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Brocco. An American stage and screen actor, he accumulated more than 300 credits over a career that spanned more than six decades before his death on December 20, 1992, in Los Angeles, following a heart attack. He was 89 years old.

Brocco began his stage career performing with the Walter Hampton Players. He made his Broadway debut in Centuries in 1927, and his Broadway work continued through 1938, when he appeared in a production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

His film work included notable appearances in Spartacus in 1960 and the Academy Award-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, in which he portrayed Colonel Matterson, a wheelchair-using patient with dementia. Television provided a substantial portion of his career as well. He played Peter the Waiter across eight episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on CBS during its 1955–1956 season. He appeared in three episodes of Adventures of Superman, portraying criminal characters; in two of those episodes his character was killed, an uncommon outcome for recurring villains in the series. In the episode The Secret of Superman, his character deduces that Clark Kent is Superman but is shot in a police confrontation, while in The Clown Who Cried he falls from a building beyond Superman's reach. In a third episode, The Phantom Ring, he played a criminal known as The Spectre and survived the story's conclusion.

Brocco appeared in two episodes of the war drama Combat!, in 1964 and 1966, and in the Star Trek episode Errand of Mercy, playing Claymare, a member of the Organian council in the episode that established the peace treaty between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. In 1969 he portrayed an artist in an episode of Adam-12, and in 1974 he appeared as a hospital patient named Mr. Egan in a Happy Days episode. In 1983 he played the father of Ali MacGraw's character in the television miniseries The Winds of War.

For approximately 40 years, Brocco lived in Laurel Canyon in a 1920s Spanish-style home on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. He maintained a ceramics studio on the ground floor of the residence, which served as a source of income during a period when he was blacklisted in the early 1950s amid the Hollywood red scare.