Al Mulock

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Alfred "Al" Mulock Rogers (born June 30, 1926 in Toronto , Ontario , † May 1968 in Guadix , Spain ) was a Canadian actor, director and artistic director.

Life

Mulock was the son of Adele Cawthra Mulock and Alfred Rogers. His great-grandfather was the Canadian Postmaster General and Secretary of Labor Sir William Mulock (1844-1944).

In the spring of 1949, Mulock and his then wife bought a barn at Jackson's Point on Lake Simcoe (north of Toronto) and converted it into a summer theater with 300 seats. Harry Belafonte sang a cappella at the inauguration of this Red Barn Theater , but the first season in the summer of 1949 was a financial failure thanks to the serious drama listed ( Tennessee Williams ' The Glass Menagerie , Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes ). Mulock then left the stage; however, the Red Barn Theater still exists today, making it Canada's oldest summer theater.

In the early 1950s Mulock went to England and worked there as a television and film actor, usually in small supporting roles. His first demonstrable film role was a brief appearance as a killer in Joe MacBeth in 1955 , a critically unsuccessful attempt by director Ken Hughes to modernize Shakespeare's tragedy as a gangster drama. This was followed by appearances in two Tarzan films with Gordon Scott ( Tarzan's Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent ) and in several star vehicles staged by Ken Hughes for the pop singer Anthony Newley ( In the Nick , Jazz Boat and The Small World of Sammy Lee ) .

After his final British film work in Freddie Francis ' amicus horror film Dr. Terror's House of Horrors went Mulock 1965 to sunnier Andalusia , the then preferred location of the spaghetti westerns -Welle where he first one of his few leading roles (in Cecil Barker Fly from the Hawk played) and then as one of the most impressive supporting role faces in spaghetti westerns such as Sergio Leones Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo , Sergio Corbuccis I crudeli and Tonino Valeriis I giorni dell'ira .

Mulock played his last role in what is probably the most famous spaghetti western : In the legendary 13-minute opening sequence of Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West ( Play Me a Song of Death ), he plays with Woody Strode and Jack Elam one of the three bandits who play waiting in silence for Charles Bronson at the desert station at Cattle Corner . During the shooting of this film, Mulock threw himself out of the window of his hotel room in his film costume and died a little later in the hospital.

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant: Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theater from the First World War to the 1970s . University of Toronto Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8020-0671-X (Paperback: ISBN 0-8020-7624-6 )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Information from Lenora Mulock; see Tom B. in the Spaghetti Western forum . The IMDb gives an obviously incorrect year of birth (1925).
  2. ^ Information from Lenora Mulock; see Tom B. in the Spaghetti Western forum
  3. ^ Peter C. Newman : Debrett's Illustrated Guide to the Canadian Establishment . Debrett, London 1983. ISBN 0-458-96790-4 . P. 234
  4. ↑ According to IMDb and Saddlemyer / Plant 1997, his wife was the actress Steffi Lock , later Steffi Henderson , with whom he had a son, Robin Mulock. After their separation, she was married to Broadway composer Luther Henderson from 1957 and died of cancer in New York in 1967. Lenora Mulock (op. Cit.), On the other hand, gives his wife's name as Catharine Ellison .
  5. ^ Denis William Johnston: Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto's Alternative Theaters, 1968-1975 . University of Toronto Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8020-5834-5 . P. 145
  6. ↑ The second season in 1950 was under the direction of Brian Doherty and was dominated by musical revues, with a correspondingly larger audience. See: Mel Atkey: Broadway North: The Dream of a Canadian Musical Theater . Natural Heritage Books, Toronto 2006. ISBN 1897045085 . P. 46
  7. ^ Richard Harland Smith in Video Watchdog No. 133, 2007, p. 18
  8. ↑ The spaghetti western expert Christian Keßler describes Mulock as "a man with an incredible face". Cf. Christian Keßler: Welcome to Hell: The Italo Western at a Glance . Terrorverlag, 2002. ISBN 3-00-009290-0 . P. 109
  9. ↑ Mickey Knox , the American dialogue writer of the film and an eyewitness to the suicide, reports in an interview that production manager Claudio Mancini drove the dying mulock to the hospital and that Leone's main concern was to save the costume, see http: //www.fistful-of- leone.com/articles/knox.html
personal data
SURNAME Mulock, Al
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mulock Rogers, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian actor, director and artistic director
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto , Ontario
DATE OF DEATH May 1968
Place of death near Guadix , Spain