Bert Freed(1919-1994)
- Actor
- Director
During the '50s and '60s it seemed like every time you turned around,
there was Bert Freed as a detective, gangster, sheriff or greedy
small-town businessman, and sci-fi fans will remember him as the police
chief taken over by the Martians in the classic
Invaders from Mars (1953). He
played a lot of tough cops--sometimes crooked ones, sometimes racist
ones, sometimes violent ones, sometimes a combination of all three--and
a lot of tough soldiers, but he could also play a jovial family
patriarch when called upon. Born and raised in New York, Freed began
acting while attending Penn State University, and made his Broadway
debut in 1942. His film debut occurred, oddly enough, in a
musical--Carnegie Hall (1947)--and
he went on to play everything from a gangster in a Ma and Pa Kettle
movie
(Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950))
to a French army sergeant--a first-rate job, too--in the classic
Paths of Glory (1957). It seems as
if he appeared in just about every cop and detective series on TV at
one time or another. He retired from acting in 1981, and died of a
heart attack in Canada in 1994 while on a fishing trip with his son.
