Patrick Waltz

Actor Patrick Waltz -- who entered movies professionally as Philip Shawn -- was a leading man and supporting player who was busy in television and occasional feature films for just over 20 years. Born in Akron, OH, in 1924, where he grew up as Jack Waltz, he landed a starring role his first time out in motion pictures in the low-budget but critically successful drama The Sun Sets At Dawn (1950), as a condemned man facing execution. Alas, despite some good notices, he soon discovered that work -- even as the star -- in a low-budget production of a Poverty Row studio wasn't the career boost that it might otherwise have been. Most of the work he got over the year that followed as Philip Shawn was in television. He also had what were mostly uncredited appearances as Patrick Waltz (or Pat Waltz) in a handful of television and low-budget movie dramas over the next few years, on series such as The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu, Circus Boy. Sugarfoot and The Gale Storm Show. In 1958, he played what was probably his best known -- and certainly his most important -- movie role, as Lt. Larry Turner, the navigator and self-styled Lothario of the space crew in the delightfully campy science fiction/adventure Queen Of Outer Space. As a real "operator" with the ladies who finds himself part of a crew stranded on Venus -- depicted as a planet populated entirely by beautiful women -- he had some of the best lines in the movie. Waltz revealed an ability as a charming scene stealer. He was also, apparently, at least as charming off camera as well, as he ended up romancing his on-screen paramour Lisa Davis from the movie -- the two were married in the summer of 1958, less than six months after shooting the picture, and they had three children before their divorce in 1971. Alas, Waltz never got another movie role that good again, and his television work was confined to supporting parts, and often very small ones, for the rest of his career. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1972, at age 47.