The Lloyd Bochner Centennial

That’s right! Canadian born actor Lloyd Bochner (1924-2005)! What’s it to ya?

People my age have seen Bochner in hundreds of things. Younger people may know him from Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991), though it should be known that in that film he was doing self-parody, just as the better known Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, George Kennedy et al have played themselves in various ZAZ projects. As it happens, I just caught him the other day in the 1973 Columbo episode The Most Dangerous Match, in which he played a Russian chess coach against opponent Laurence Harvey in one of his last performances. Russians were something of a minor specialty of Bochner’s. He’d played Soviet spies on shows like Mission: Impossible and The Six Million Dollar Man, which are among the places where I would have first seen him.

Bochner had spent the 1950s alternating between Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival and live American television dramas. In 1960, he was cast as one of the leads in the short-lived TV series Hong Kong (this was back when it was still a British colony of course). One of his earliest well-known performances was as the 1962 “Two Serve Man” episode of The Twilight Zone. For a brief stretch he was in several movies, including Harlow (1965), Point Blank (1967), two late Frank Sinatra vehicles Tony Rome (1967) and The Detective (1968), The Dunwich Horror (1970), Ulzana’s Raid (1972),Satan’s School for Girls (1973) and A Fire in the Sky (1978), the latter two for television.

In TV he truly found a niche. He was good looking but of hard-looking and intense, and fairly merciless eyes. When he hit middle age he was perfect for jerky businessmen, spies, military officers and the like — just the kind of roles TV was always casting. His credits include Hogan’s Heroes,Ironside, The F.B.I., It Takes a Thief, Emergency, Police Story, McMillan and Wife, Charlie’s Angels,Hawaii Five O and many others.

For a patch of the ’80s Bochner was associated with prime time soaps. For example, he was a regular on Dynasty (his character died while shtupping Joan Collins — what a way to go! I’d say I love to go that way myself, but now that she’s 92 I, erm…have too much respect for her wisdom and maturity. But 40, 50 years ago, color me 50 shades of Lloyd Bochner!) Bochner was also to have played a principal role on Santa Barbara, but a real-life heart attack sidelined him. And he was also in three episodes of Hotel.

In the ’90s he did voice-overs in Batman cartoons, and was in such stuff as Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah, which I’m told received many fewer disgruntled letters than my own holiday show, Pork Chops for Chanukah. His last screen credit was in Mark Sobel’sThe Commission (2003), a drama based on the transcripts of The Warren Commission Report.

Lloyd’s son is actor Hart Bochner (b. 1956)