Charles Drake

 Charles Drake (October 2, 1917 – September 10, 1994)

In 1939, he turned to acting and signed a contract with Warner Brothers, but he was not immediately successful. During World War II, Drake served in the United States Army. Drake returned to Hollywood in 1945 and was cast in Conflict which starred Humphrey Bogart. His contract with Warner Brothers eventually ended. In the 1940s, he did some freelance work, like A Night in Casablanca (1946). In 1949, he moved to Universal Studios. where Drake co-starred with James Stewart and Shelley Winters in Winchester '73 (1950) and again co-starred with Stewart in the film Harvey (also 1950) a screen adaptation of the Broadway play. He co-starred in the Audie Murphy bio pic, To Hell and Back (1955), as Murphy's close friend "Brandon". In 1955, Drake turned to television as one of the stock-company players on Montgomery's Summer Stock, a summer replacement for Robert Montgomery Presents and from 1957 he hosted the syndicated TV espionage weekly Schilling Playhouse (also known as Rendezvous). In 1959, he starred in the Western film, No Name on the Bullet, where he played a doctor dedicated to saving a small town from a dangerous assassin. He played in eighty-three films between 1939 and 1975, including Scream, Pretty Peggy. More than fifty were dramas, but he also acted in comedies, science fiction, horror, and film noir. In an episode of the original Star Trek series ("The Deadly Years", 1967), he guested as Commodore Stocker.

He died on September 10, 1994 in East Lyme, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-six.