- Born
- Died
- Birth nameCarl Henry Vogt
- Nickname
- Lou
- Height6′ 1½″ (1.87 m)
- Tall, distinguished, aristocratic Louis Calhern seemed to be the poster boy for old-money, upper-crust urban society, but he was actually born Carl Vogt, to middle-class parents in New York City. His family moved to St. Louis when he was a child, and it was while playing football in high school there that he was spotted by a representative of a touring acting troupe and hired as an actor. He returned to New York to work in the theater, but his career was interrupted by military service in France in World War I. He returned to the stage after the war, and eventually broke into films. Although his regal bearing would seem to pigeonhole him in aristocratic parts in serious drama, he proved to be a very versatile actor, as much at home playing a comic foil to The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933) as he was as Buffalo Bill to Betty Hutton's Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (1950) or, most memorably, the lawyer involved with the criminal gang in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Married four times, he was in Tokyo, Japan, filming The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) when he suffered a fatal heart attack.- IMDb Mini Biography By: [email protected]
- SpousesMarianne Stewart(November 25, 1946 - July 19, 1955) (divorced)Natalie Schafer(April 20, 1933 - May 1, 1946) (divorced)Julia Hoyt(September 17, 1927 - August 6, 1932) (divorced)Ilka Chase(June 2, 1926 - February 1927) (divorced)
- Snobby and/or excessively-powerful characters
- Tall frame, erect carriage and often upturned nose
- In 1950 he replaced Frank Morgan as Buffalo Bill, after he died of a heart attack while filming Annie Get Your Gun (1950). In 1956, Paul Ford replaced Calhern after he died of a heart attack while filming The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).
- Calhern joined the famed actors club, The Lambs, in NYC in 1922.
- He has appeared in six films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Duck Soup (1933), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Notorious (1946), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Blackboard Jungle (1955).
- Appeared as a character in Gore Vidal's 1974 novel "Myron," his sequel to Myra Breckinridge (1970), co-starring with Maria Montez and Bruce Cabot in the apocryphal movie "Siren of Babylon" that is being shot on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in 1948 in the novel. In the "movie," Calhern "played" the role of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar.
- Was in three Oscar Best Picture nominees: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Heaven Can Wait (1943) and Julius Caesar (1953), with the first of these the only winner.
- [Romantic suggestions for André Previn] Take my advice. Forget it with chorus girls. Find somebody older. Get some cuff links.
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