Than Wyenn, a busy character actor whose lengthy list of credits include the films Imitation of Life and Splash and a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone, died Friday at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills, his family announced. He was 95.
Wyenn spent more than 40 years in film and television and has a whopping 150 credits listed on IMDb.
In “Execution,” a 1960 episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone, Wyenn played a bad guy who gets what’s coming to him when he is transported via time machine into a hangman’s noose in the Old West. The episode also features future Gilligan’s Island star Russell Johnson.
Wyenn played the Italian film representative Romano who woos Lana Turner’s character in the 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life and appeared as Mr. Ambrose in Splash (1984), starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah. He also showed up in such films as Beginning of the End (1957), Pete Kelly’s Blues (1959), The Boy and the Pirates (1960) and Being There (1979).
A native of New York, Wyenn toured nationally with a Shakespearean troupe, moved to Los Angeles and starred in the world premiere production of Baruch Lumet’s Once Upon a Tailor at The Circle Theater.
He worked primarily in television during his career, popping up on such shows as Dragnet, Zorro, Perry Mason, Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Untouchables, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, Barnaby Jones, Quincy M.E. and T.J. Hooker.
A voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1966, Wyenn worked for 37 years as the drama consultant for the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education.
Survivors include his wife of 71 years, Guy; sons Joel and Neil; and grandchildren Morgan, Diana, Michael, Shane and Brittany.
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