Lloyd Bochner, a classically trained actor who played suave heroes and villains for more than 50 years in theater, television and film, died Saturday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 81.
The cause was cancer, his son Paul Bochner said.
Mr. Bochner began working professionally on TV and on the stage in his native Canada. He joined the Stratford Festival of Canada in 1953 and spent six years there.
In the U.S., Mr. Bochner joined the cast of the early television drama “One Man’s Family” in 1952. He starred as a police chief in the 1960’s mystery series “Hong Kong.” He had a leading role in “Dynasty” as Cecil Colby in the 1981-82 season.
He made dozens of guest appearances in other TV shows and was featured in movies including “The Detective,” “Tony Rome,” ” Point Blank” and “The Man in the Glass Booth.” His last film credit was “The Commission” (2003).
His most memorable TV role was as Michael Chambers in the famous 1962 “Twilight Zone” episode “To Serve Man.”
Chambers and his assistant are experts in charge of translating a book given to Earth by visiting extraterrestrials. The assistant learns that it is a cookbook but is too late to save Mr. Bochner’s character from boarding a spaceship and heading toward becoming an alien meal. He parodied the episode’s climactic scene in “The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.”
