Biography
Born in New York City, Louis Calhern moved to St. Louis with his family as a child. There he played high-school football, and while engaged in gridiron activity he was spotted by a theatrical manager and hired as a supernumerary in a local stage troupe. Borrowing money from his father, Calhern headed to New York to pursue acting. Because World War I was going on at the time, the young actor thought it expedient to change his Teutonic given name of Carl Henry Vogt ("Calhern" was a rearrangement of the letters in his first and second names). After his first Broadway break in the 1923 George M. Cohan production
Song and Dance Man, the tall, velvet-voiced Calhern became a matinee idol by virtue of a play titled
The Cobra. In films from 1921, Calhern thrived in the early talkie era as a cultured, saturnine villain. For a time, Calhern battled alcoholism and lost several important stage and screen assignments because of his personal problems, but by the late 1940s, Calhern had gone cold turkey and completely cleaned up his act. He was brilliant as Oliver Wendell Holmes in both the Broadway and film versions of
The Magnificent Yankee, and from 1950 onward made several well-reviewed appearances as Shakespeare's King Lear (his favorite role). An MGM contract player throughout the 1950s, Calhern was seen as Buffalo Bill in
Annie Get Your Gun (1950), the above-suspicion criminal mastermind (and "uncle" of kept woman Marilyn Monroe) in
The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the title character in
Julius Caesar (1953). Louis Calhern died of a sudden heart attack while filming
The Teahouse of the August Moon in Japan; he was replaced by character actor Paul Ford. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide