Reggie Nalder

Reggie Nalder
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Portrays:	Chancery Dealer
Date of Birth:	September 04, 1907
Date of Death:	November 19, 1991
Nationality:
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Reggie Nalder (born Alfred Reginald Natzler; September 4, 1907 – November 19, 1991) was an Austrian-born character actor who portrayed a Chancery Dealer in "Saga of a Star World." Over a career spanning five decades, the Vienna-born émigré became one of genre cinema's most recognizable faces — a singular screen presence shaped as much by biography as by craft.

Career

Nalder was born into a Viennese theatrical family: his father, Sigmund Natzler, was an operetta singer and co-owner of a small cabaret called Hölle ("Hell"), located in the basement of the Theater an der Wien, and his mother, Ida, appeared in German silent films between 1919 and 1929. He performed as an Apache dancer on Parisian cabaret stages and worked as a painter and set designer for his father's venue before moving into acting at Viennese theaters during the 1920s and 1930s. When Nazism took hold in Austria, Nalder — born into a Jewish family — fled to Paris, later working for the German-language service of the BBC before returning to film.

His screen career began with Erich von Stroheim's Le Signal rouge (1948), and early European credits included roles alongside Errol Flynn and Vincent Price in Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951). His breakthrough came when Alfred Hitchcock cast him as Rien, the cold-eyed assassin in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), whose climactic Albert Hall sequence — Nalder's scarred face peering from behind a curtain as he awaits his moment — became one of that film's most arresting images. He subsequently relocated permanently to the United States, where his scarred appearance — the result of a burn accident whose circumstances he deliberately kept obscure, offering different explanations at different times — made him a sought-after character player in villain and monster roles.

Television work through the 1960s included two episodes of Boris Karloff's Thriller (1961), playing the title character in "The Return of Andrew Bentley" and Gafke in "The Terror in Teakwood," and the role of Shras, the first Andorian ever depicted on screen, in the Star Trek episode "Journey to Babel" (1967). On the big screen, Dario Argento wrote the role of the Yellow Jacket Assassin in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) specifically for him after seeing Nalder on a Roman film set, and he played the witch-hunter Albino in the notorious Mark of the Devil (1970), a film whose producers marketed with vomit bags for the audience. He took considerable personal pride in his role in Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976).

His most culturally enduring role came when producer Richard Kobritz cast him as Kurt Barlow in Tobe Hooper's television adaptation of Salem's Lot (CBS, 1979), Stephen King's vampire novel. In a creative departure from the source material, the filmmakers reimagined Barlow not as a suave, speaking aristocrat but as a silent, feral creature visually indebted to Nosferatu, and Nalder's own bone structure and scarring provided much of the required horror with minimal prosthetic enhancement. Despite appearing on screen for less than two minutes of the three-hour production, the performance made Barlow one of genre television's most recognizable monster images; Entertainment Weekly later ranked it eighth on their list of the twenty greatest screen vampires. When asked about the physically demanding shoot, Nalder was characteristically direct:

The makeup and contact lenses were painful but I got used to them. I liked the money best of all.

—Reggie Nalder, on filming Salem's Lot, from a 1989 interview with David Del Valle.

His final screen credit was Jericho (1991), a Venezuelan production directed by Luis Alberto Lamata.

Battlestar Galactica

Nalder appeared in "Saga of a Star World," the pilot of Battlestar Galactica, in a small uncredited role as a Chancery Dealer at the gambling tables on the planet Carillon. His single line of dialogue — "Are you going to play, sir?" — was dubbed by an uncredited American actor in the theatrical release version of the film, though the original recording of Nalder's Austrian-accented delivery was retained in the television broadcast version.

Personal Life

Very little was publicly documented about Nalder's private life, a condition he deliberately cultivated throughout his career. Even those who knew him well noted his guardedness: his friend and colleague David Del Valle wrote that Nalder "voluntarily contributed to creating that aura of mystery around him."

He was fluent in four languages and was described by Del Valle as a man of wide cultural interests who loved opera, particularly Puccini's Tosca. His grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, where he is buried alongside his mother Ida, went unmarked for more than two decades following his death before a headstone was installed through the efforts of a private researcher.

Nalder died of bone cancer on November 19, 1991, at a nursing home in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 84.

External Links

• Reggie Nalder article at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
• Reggie Nalder article at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.

References