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 The Final Resting Place of Lionel Stander.

Lionel Stander
11th.January 1908 - 30th.November 1994.
Located in the Garden of Honor plot 7246.

Lionel Jay Stander was an American character actor in movies, radio, theater and television.
Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children. His 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 role because he shot craps with some of the company. He appeared in a string of short-lived plays through the early 1930s, including "The House Beautiful," which Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play lousy." In 1932, he landed his first film role in the Warner-Vitaphone short feature "In the Dough," with Fatty Arbuckle and Shemp Howard. He made several other shorts, the last being "The Old Grey Mayor" with Bob Hope in 1935. That year, he was in his first feature, Noel Coward's "The Scoundrel." He moved to Hollywood and was put under contract at Columbia Pictures. Stander acted steadily through the 1930s, most notably in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town with Gary Cooper and Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936, and A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in 1937. Stander's distinctive rumbling voice, tough-guy demeanor and talent with accents made him a popular radio actor. In the 1930s and 1940s he was on the Eddie Cantor Show, Bing Crosby's KMH show, the Lux Radio Theater production of "A Star Is Born," the "Fred Allen Show", the "Mayor of the Town" series with Lionel Barrymore and Agnes Moorehead, Kraft Music Hall on NBC, Stage Door Canteen on CBS, the "Lincoln Highway Radio Show" on NBC, and the "Jack Paar Show", among others. In 1941 he originated the title role of "The Life of Riley" on CBS, later made famous by William Bendix. He was a regular on Danny Kaye's zany comedy-variety radio show on CBS (1946–1947), playing himself as "just the elevator operator" amidst the antics of Kaye, future Our Miss Brooks star Eve Arden, and bandleader Harry James.
Strongly liberal and pro-labor, Stander espoused a variety of social and political causes, and was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. He supported the Conference of Studio Unions in its fight against the Mob-influenced International Alliance of Stage Employees (IATSE). Consequently in 1938, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn called Stander "a Red son of a bitch," and threatened a $100,000 fine against any studio that renewed his contract. Stander was among the first group of Hollywood actors to be subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1940 for supposed Communist activities. Stander forced himself into a grand jury hearing, and the district attorney subsequently cleared him of the allegations. Nevertheless, Stander appeared in no movies from 1939 to 1941; then, with HUAC's attentions focused elsewhere during World War II, he played in a number of mostly second-rate pictures from independent studios through the late 1940s. The most memorable of the lot are "Guadalcanal Diary" (1943), Ben Hecht's "Specter of the Rose" (1946), Harold Lloyd's "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" (1947) and Preston Sturges's "Unfaithfully Yours" with Rex Harrison (1948). HUAC returned its attention to Hollywood in 1947. In a so-called "private" hearing in 1948, actor Larry Parks named Stander as a Communist, which made the newspapers two days later. Stander was blacklisted from movies again, though he played on TV, radio and in the theater. Actor Marc Lawrence named him as a Communist in a HUAC hearing in 1951, after which Stander was blacklisted from TV and radio. He continued to act in the theater, and was in a 1953 revival of "Pal Joey" on Broadway and on tour. In May 1953, Stander caused an uproar at a HUAC hearing and made front-page headlines nationwide by being a spectacularly uncooperative witness, memorialized in the Eric Bentley play, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been". In a dig at bandleader Artie Shaw, who had tearfully claimed in a Committee hearing that he had been "duped" by the Communist Party, Stander testified, "I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or a schmoe...I was absolutely conscious of what I was doing, and I am not ashamed of anything I said in public or private." An excerpt from that statement was engraved in stone for "The First Amendment Blacklist Memorial" by Jenni Holzer at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. After that, Stander's acting career went into a free fall. He worked as a stock broker on Wall Street, a journeyman stage actor, a corporate spokesman--even a New Orleans Mardi Gras king. He didn't return to Broadway till 1961 (and then only briefly in a flop) and to film in 1963, in the low-budget "The Moving Finger".
Life improved for Stander when he moved to London in 1964 to act in "St. Joan of the Stockyards," directed by Tony Richardson, for whom he'd acted on Broadway, along with Christopher Plummer, in a stillborn 1963 production of "Alberto Ui," also by Bertolt Brecht. The next year, Richardson broke the Hollywood blacklist for Stander by casting him in the delicious black comedy about the funeral industry, "The Loved One"", based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh (who disavowed the movie), with an all-star cast including Jonathan Winters, Robert Morse, Liberace, Rod Steiger, Paul Williams and many others. In 1966, Roman Polanski memorably cast Stander in his only starring role, as the thug Dickie in "Cul-de-Sac," opposite Françoise Dorléac and Donald Pleasence. Stander stayed in Europe and eventually settled in Rome, where he appeared in many spaghetti Westerns, most notably playing a bartender named Max in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. In Rome he connected with Robert Wagner, who cast him in an episode of "It Takes a Thief" that was shot there. Stander's few English-language movies in the 1970s include "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" with Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach, Steven Spielberg's "1941," and Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" with Liza Minelli and Robert De Niro. After 15 years abroad, Stander moved back to the U.S. for the role he is now most famous for: Max, the loyal butler, cook, and chauffeur to the wealthy, amateur detectives played by Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers on the 1979–1984 television series Hart to Hart (and a subsequent series of Hart to Hart made-for-TV movies). In 1983, Stander won a Golden Globe Award for "Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV". In 1986, he became the voice of Kup in Transformers: The Movie. His final theatrical movie role, fittingly, was as a dying hospital patient in "The Last Good Time" (1994), with Armin Mueller-Stahl and Olivia d'Abo, directed by Bob Balaban.
Stander's personal life was as tumultuous as his professional one. He was married six times--always to beautiful young women, most of them artists--the first time in 1932 and the last in 1972. All but the last marriage ended in divorce. He fathered six daughters (one wife had no children; one had twins), the first five of whom he left by age three.
Stander died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, California, at age 86. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.