Hart to Hart

Lionel Jay Stander was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television. Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children. According to newspaper interviews with Stander, as a teenager he appeared in the 1926 silent film Men of... Steel, perhaps as an extra; he is not listed in the credits. During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in a student production of "The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village." Stander's professional acting career began in 1928, as Cop and First Fairy in "Him" by e.e. cummings at the Provincetown Playhouse. He claimed that he got the roles because one of them required shooting craps, which he did well, and a friend in the company volunteered him. He appeared in a series of short-lived plays through the early 1930s, including The House Beautiful, which Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play lousy." In 1932, Stander landed his first credited film role in the Warner-Vitaphone short feature In the Dough, with Fatty Arbuckle and Shemp Howard.
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