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GERALD MOHR BIOGRAPHY
Gerald Leonard Mohr was born on 11 June 1914 in New York City, the son of Gerald Mohr Sr. and Henrietta Noustadt, a Viennese singer. His father died suddenly in 1917 and Gerald was then brought up by his mother and his grandfather, who was a psychologist and associate of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Encouraged by his grandfather, young Gerald became Freud's student.
Gerald attended the prestigious Dwight Preparatory School in New York where he learned to ride horses, play chess and speak French and German fluently. He also played his own piano compositions at school recitals.
As a teenager, while in hospital with appendicitis, Gerald met radio commentator Andre Baruch, who, because of his pleasant baritone voice and good diction, persuaded Gerald to audition for a job in radio. He became a CBS radio staff correspondent for 3 years while studying pre-med at Columbia University. However, showbiz had more appeal for the young man and that was the career he chose.
In the early 1930s he joined Orson Welles' prestigious Mercury Theatre group, with whom he made his Broadway debut in "Jean Christophe", followed by "The Petrified Forest".
His movie debut occurred in 1938 in an uncredited performance in the film "Society Smugglers".
In 1939 he married his childhood sweetheart, Rita Deneau. Their son, Anthony, was born in 1947. Anthony is now a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge.
During the 1940s Gerald worked continuously, sometimes several times a week, on the radio networks, interspersing this with film work. In 1941 he played "Slick Latimer", the bad guy in the 15 episode cliffhanger serial "Jungle Girl" for Republic. From 1942 to 1945 he served in the US Air Force. His first film starring role on his return from the War came when he joined a number of other actors who played Michael Lanyard, aka The Lone Wolf. He made 3 films in this series, "The Notorious Lone Wolf", "The Lone Wolf in Mexico" and "The Lone Wolf in London". He also made a guest appearance in the Rita Hayworth film noir, "Gilda" (1946).
In September 1948 he made his debut for CBS Radio as Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe in "The Adventures of Philip Marlowe". He made 119 episodes between 1948 and 1951 and is still regarded as THE voice of Marlowe for his powerful character portrayal. Raymond Chandler once remarked, in a letter to a friend in the 1950s, that "A voice like Gerald Mohr's gave you a personality which you could fill out to your fancy." In 1950 "Radio and Television Life" magazine named Gerald Mohr "The Best Male Actor on Radio".
Gerald also started working in television in 1951.
In 1952 Gerald decided to undergo plastic surgery to his nose in order to slightly change his appearance following the fame he gained as "The Lone Wolf". Unfortunately, a few months after recovering from the surgery, he met with an accident which broke his nose and caused a large gash to the right side of his face. "Boy meets window" was the only comment Gerald made at the time, but the circumstances surrounding this accident were never divulged to the newspapers. The facial injury, as can clearly be seen thereafter, resulted in a large scar and caused permanent damage to the muscles on the right side of his face.
During 1954-55 he worked in Europe on the syndicated TV series "Foreign Intrigue: Cross Current". There were 39 episodes made, during which Gerald travelled over 60,000 miles throughout Europe with a Swedish film crew and supporting actors from Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. It was during this time that he met Mai Dietrich (née Cedeby), who was a script editor with the Swedish film company. During several episodes of "Foreign Intrigue: Cross Current", Gerald can be seen playing on the piano his own composition for the show, called "The Frontier Theme", so called because his character, Christopher Storm, owned a hotel in Vienna called the Frontier. "Foreign Intrigue" was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1954 under the category "Best Mystery, Action or Adventure Program" and again in 1955 under the category "Best Mystery or Intrigue Series".
On his return to America he worked increasingly in TV as guest star in series such as TV Westerns Maverick, Cheyenne, Bonanza, Bronco, Outlaws, Bat Masterson etc. For every hero there has to be a villain, and Gerald held a unique position in the industry, in that he was a very handsome baddie. More often than not, he ended up face down in the dust at the hands of the righteous good guys! A fairly accurate estimate of the number of times he "died" for the cameras, both in films and TV, would be at around 50! It was during this time too that the skills and talents he learned as a youngster came to fruition, as he was an expert horseman, able to ride at the gallop close-up for the cameras (see "Duel at Silver Creek") and, in an episode of Cheyenne called "Rendezvous at Red Rock", he was seen singing and playing the piano. He had a fine baritone voice and should be considered a real loss to the musical comedy stage!
In July 1957 Mrs Rita Mohr was granted a divorce from her husband. Mrs Mohr charged cruelty and told Superior Court that Gerald wouldn't accept emotional responsibilities for his family. "He just wanted his freedom." Mrs Mohr is quoted as saying in various newspaper articles at the time. She was given custody of their son, Anthony, and ownership of the family home at Sherman Oaks.
A year later, on 8 July 1958, Gerald married Mai Dietrich in a civil ceremony before actress Gloria Winters, a minister ordained by the Institute of Infinite Science (source: various newspaper articles).
Gerald continued to work in films and television. His most notable movies were The Buckskin Lady (1957), Terror in the Haunted House (1958), Guns, Girls and Gangsters (1959), Date with Death (1959), This Rebel Breed aka The Black Rebels (1959) and The Angry Red Planet (1960), a film in which he was actually the hero for once!
The sheer volume of work that Gerald Mohr produced during his lifetime is quite amazing. In the department of statistics, partially attributed to IMDb, at time of writing this biographer estimates that he had acted in 92 television shows, plus the 15 episodes of "Jungle Girl" and 39 episodes of "Foreign Intrigue: Cross Current", 70 movies, 540 radio plays (including all his 119 Philip Marlowe episodes but not including the broadcasts he made as a news reporter in the early days), 4 stage plays that this biographer is aware of, and 3 cartoon series as voice talent. There also were other pilots he made that did not reach the screen, including "Rough Sketch", made in Stockholm in 1956, "Rendezvous in Acapulco", the pilot for "Holiday for Hire", made in December 1962/January 1963. In 1958, Warner Brothers proposed making a series called "Doc Holliday", starring Gerald, based on his performances of the historical character in Maverick "The Quick and the Dead" and "Seed of Deception" and the Tombstone Territory episode "Doc Holliday in Durango", but the series never came to screen.
In 1964 Gerald, together with Mai, planned the formation of an international film company which would have featured comedy, adventure, crime and drama shows. It was a joint collaboration with Swedish and American writers, headquartered in Stockholm. The productions would have been distributed worldwide.
In 1968 he had a role in what was perhaps his most prestigious movie, "Funny Girl", starring Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif, with whom he played two scenes as Tom Branca, the gambling house boss. In a newspaper article dated 10 August 1968, after the filming of his first scene in "Funny Girl", director William Wyler is quoted as saying to him: "Very nice, Gerry. But now you have the luxury of being able to relax and take your time!" Gerald said that, as he was so used to the fast pace of TV, the comment came as a bit of a surprise. Gerald then left to film "The Big Valley", returning to the fast pace of TV. "The Big Valley" episode, "Flight from San Miguel", in which Gerald played Dr Raoul Mendez, a former Mexican university professor turned rebel leader, was to be the last TV Western he ever made.
Shortly after, in September 1968, he flew out to Stockholm to film the pilot of a new TV series, "Private Entrance", in which he played Jeff Landers, the private detective for a Swedish hotel. He was staying at a friend's house in Södermalm, Stockholm City, when, in the evening of 9 November 1968, while packing his suitcase to return to America the following day, he suffered a fatal heart attack. Gerald was cremated and Mai interred his remains in the wall of the Garden of Remembrance at Lidingö Kyrka, on Lidingö Island, to the east of Stockholm, because he loved Sweden and felt at home there.
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Gerald Mohr was a very intelligent, multi-talented man. The timbre of his voice was very pleasing to the ear. His voice talents included Mexican, Italian, English and mid-European accents. Tall (6'2"), dark and handsome, with a mischievous sense of humour, he was the perfect radio, film and TV star and one of the best American character actors of his generation. He is gone from our midst but, because of the large body of work he produced during his lifetime, quite a lot of which is now readily available, he will never be forgotten.
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Supplementary Information
Did you know that:
1) Gerald's favourite music was the Broadway musical tunes.
2) He continued to play the piano recreationally throughout his life. As mentioned above, he played one of his musical compositions, "The Frontier Theme", during several episodes of his 1954-55 TV series "Foreign Intrigue - Cross Current".
3) One of the songs he loved to play and sing was "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo".
4) He played tennis and was an excellent swimmer.
5) He smoked Player's cigarettes.
6) He was fluent in French and German and spoke Swedish with a German accent!
7) An unfulfilled ambition was to play a circus clown - he even commissioned a painting that portrays him as a clown.
8) His nickname in the industry was "The Iron Duke" - "Iron" because of his steely nerve when problems on set arose, and "Duke" because of his aristocratic appearance.
9) He was an art and book collector with, for example, first editions of Anatole France's work, signed by the author. He was also an expert in French literature.
10) The word mohr/mhorr, means a West African gazelle. In Gaelic, mohr means 'big'.
11) The name history and origin for Mohr is:
a) North German: Topographic name for someone who lived in a fen. Middle Low German MOR.
b) German and Dutch: nickname for a man of swarthy complexion, from Middle High German MOR, Middle Dutch MO(E)R 'Moor'.
c) German: from a short form of an old personal name MORHART.
(My thanks to Ancestry.com for the name derivation information.)
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My thanks to Tim Dietrich and Sven Erick Alm for the personal information, Bill Geerhart of Conelrad for permission to use his biographical research, Brian's Drive-In Theater for their biographical notes and Jon at OTRCAT.com for creating "The Gerald Mohr Radio Collection".
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