Allan Rich, a longtime member of The Legion of 'Hey, It's That Guy!' Character Actors, dies of dementia at 94.
From The Hollywood Reporter: "Allan Rich, Character Actor Who Overcame the Blacklist, Dies at 94"
After 10 years or so of theater and movie work, Rich's acting career came to a halt when he landed on the Hollywood blacklist.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote:
In 1953, Rich was branded a communist — he said that was a result of attempting a few years earlier to free a Black man from Mississippi who had been wrongly convicted of rape — and was abruptly fired from the NBC anthology series Philco Playhouse.
"My agent never sent me out [on another audition]," he recalled in a 2007 interview. "I would walk into an office, making the rounds. And I'd walk out going phhffffft. It took a year till an actor said to me, 'Hey, we're on Red Channels.' If your name was on that list, goooooood-byyyyye! You never worked."
He spent a few years as a Wall Street broker and running an art gallery before he got back into acting in 1963.
Allan Rich also was a member of what might be called "The Barney Miller Repertory Company", which included Peggy Pope, Don Calfa, Florence Halop, Richard Libertini, Alex Henteloff, and others.
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