Lawrence Dobkin

Lawrence Dobkin
Born	September 16, 1919(1919-09-16) New York City, New York
Died	October 28, 2002 (aged 83) Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Television actor, director, screenwriter

Lawrence Dobkin (16 September 1919, New York City – 28 October 2002, Los Angeles, California) was an American television director, actor and television screenwriter whose career spanned seven decades.

Dobkin was a prolific performer during the Golden Age of Radio. His voice was used to narrate the classic western Broken Arrow (1950) and The Robe (1953). His film performances include Never Fear (1949), Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and North by Northwest (1959). He announced the landmark television series Naked City (1958–1963), closing each episode with the statement, "There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this has been one of them."^[1]

Radio

A former child actor, Dobkin began working in radio to pay for his studies at the Yale University School of Drama. He understudied on Broadway before serving with a radio propaganda unit of the Air Force during World War II. When he returned to network radio he was one of five actors who played the detective Ellery Queen. In The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe (1950–1951), Dobkin played detective Archie Goodwin opposite Sydney Greenstreet's Nero Wolfe.

While playing Louie, The Saint's cab-driving sidekick on NBC radio in 1951, he was asked to step into the lead role of Simon Templar to replace Tom Conway for a single episode — making Dobkin one of the few actors to portray Leslie Charteris' literary creation.^[2]

His other radio work included Escape (1947–1954), Gunsmoke (1952–1961) and the anthology series Lux Radio Theater. "The few of us who are left," Dobkin said of his radio days not long before he died, "keep telling each other that we never had it so good."^[3]

Continuing to work as a voice actor throughout his career, Dobkin contributed to the video game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear (1999).

Television

Dobkin began a prolific career in television in 1946, having worked as an actor, narrator and director. He appeared in an episode of the early syndicated series The Silent Service, based on true stories of the submarine section of the United States Navy. In the 1957-1958 television season, he played a director on the CBS sitcom, Mr. Adams and Eve, starring Howard Duff and Ida Lupino as fictitious married actors residing in Beverly Hills, California. In 1960, he appeared as Kurt Reynolds in "So Dim the Light" of the CBS anthology series, The DuPont Show with June Allyson.

Often otherwise cast as the villain, Dobkin portrayed gangster Dutch Schultz on ABC's The Untouchables and a mass murderer in the 1972 pilot for ABC's The Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden. ^[4] He received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Drama for his work in the CBS Playhouse program, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (1967). In 1991 Dobkin appeared on an episode of the TV series Night Court as State Supreme Court Justice Welch.

As writer, Dobkin created the title character for the 1974 film and the 1977–1978 NBC series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. He began directing for television in 1960, and his work in this area included the pilot and episodes of The Munsters (1964) and 16 episodes of The Waltons (1972–1981).

Films

Dobkin's notable supporting film roles include Twelve O'Clock High (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Julius Caesar (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Defiant Ones (1958) and Patton (1970). In an uncredited performance in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Dobkin has a memorable line as an intelligence official who remarks on the plight of the hapless protagonist, on the run for murder after being mistaken for a person who doesn't exist: "It's so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?"

On June 24, 1962, he married actress Joanna Barnes; they had no children, but he had one daughter by his first wife. Dobkin married actress Anne Collings in 1970 and had two children. His identical-twin daughters followed him into the business — Kristy Dobkin^[5] as a writer, and Kaela Dobkin^[6] as an actress.

He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea.

External links

• Lawrence Dobkin at the Internet Movie Database
• Lawrence Dobkin at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Lawrence Dobkin at Find a Grave
• The New York Times movies (Allmovie)
• Lawrence Dobkin as The Saint

References