Elisha Cook, Jr.
Elisha Cook Jr. Vanslyck ( born December 26, 1903 in San Francisco, California, † 18 May 1995 Big Pine, California ) was an American actor. He became known by the frequent personification of cowardly or neurotic crooks in many gangster movies and film noirs.
Life
Cook, the son of a theater actor and producer, grew up in Chicago and began his career at the age of fourteen years as a vaudeville and Broadway performer in New York. His professional career began in October 1925 piece The Crooked Friday; among his greatest successes scored his role in the play Ah, Wilderness! 1928 his performance was highly praised in Her Unborn Child by the critics. Cook repeated the interpretation in the film adaptation of the play in the following year; one of his rare film appearances until the mid- 1930s.
1936 Cook signed a contract with the production company Paramount Pictures, later he moved to Warner Brothers. In the following years, the lanky, wieselgesichtige, inconspicuous, small actors worked together with some of the most renowned directors of his time as John Huston, Howard Hawks and Robert Siodmak. He was almost always a traitor, hypocrite, To - Come - type short staffed and entered as in numerous batch roles, often as a criminal on. In 1942 he interrupted his career for two years and joined the military. His most prominent appearances graduated from Cook in the 1940s and 1950s crime films such as The Maltese Falcon (1942, in which he has to endure as a small time crook " Wilmer " Humphrey Bogart " Sam Spade " repeatedly taunts ), The Big Sleep ( in a positive, but no less tragic and ending with the Vergiftungstod role as " Jones " ), and the bill did not go on. In selteren cases, he turned it out to be the actual murderer. In addition, there are some in Western Cook's filmography. Outstanding He also starred in You, Man ( in which he plays a drum solo ) and Shane with a spectacular death scene. In addition to his until the 1980 -year-long career in film - 1974 for example, he repeated his role as " Wilmer " for a failed remake - he was also in television series such as The Untouchables, one thousand miles Staub ( Rawhide ) to see Perry Mason or spacecrafts. From 1981, he worked regularly as a guest star in the series Magnum, in which he chose to Hawaii as a retreat -to-do former gangster king "Ice Pick" interpreted.
Cook, who lived a very secluded private in a mountain hut and by courier received his offer, was married twice. From his first wife, the actress Mary Lou Cook, he was divorced in 1942 and married Peggy McKenna.