Ben Lackland(1901-1959)
- Actor
Ben Lackland came to New York in 1925 to study at the Theater Guild
School and lived in Manhattan until 1958. During his career, he
appeared in many plays with such figures as Josephine Hull, Walter
Hampden, Ruth Gordon, Otis Skinner and Ethel Barrymore. He met his
future wife, stage actress Marjorie Dulin, during the Lakeland Players'
production of "Yes, My Darling Daughter" in Maine, and he played in
thirty Broadway productions before switching to the infant medium of
television in 1946. By 1950 he was a five-night-a-week regular on
"Captain Video and His Video Rangers" as the benevolent Commissioner of
Public Safety Charles Carey. He was 58 when he died at home from an
overdose of barbiturates. The Essex County Medical Examiner's Office's
autopsy report said that Ben Lackland was a "suicide by ingestion of an
overdose of sleeping pills."
