Lee Van Cleef Biography
Born: January 09, 1925
Died: December 14, 1989
Following a wartime tour with the Navy, New Jersey-born Lee Van Cleef supported himself as an accountant. Like fellow accountant-turned-actor Jack_Elam, Van Cleef was advised by his clients that he had just the right satanic facial features to thrive as a movie villain. With such rare exceptions as The_Beast_From_20,000_Fathoms (1954), Van Cleef spent most of his early screen career on the wrong side of the law, menacing everyone from Gary_Cooper (High_Noon) to the Bowery_Boys (Private_Eyes) with his cold, shark-eyed stare. Van Cleef left Hollywood in the '60s to appear in European spaghetti Westerns, initially as a secondary actor; he was, for example, the "Bad" in Clint_Eastwood's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Within a few years, Van Cleef was starring in blood-spattered action films with such titles as Day of Anger (1967), El_Condor (1970), and Mean Frank and Crazy Tony (1975). The actor was, for many years, one of the international film scene's biggest box-office draws. Returning to Hollywood in the late '70s, He starred in a very short-lived martial arts TV series The_Master (1984), the pilot episodes of which were pieced together into an ersatz feature film for video rental. Van Cleef died of a heart attack in 1989. Hal Erickson, Rovi
Browse More Actors:
