Gordon Sterne

Known for ActingBorn 1923-01-16Died 2017-04-04Essen, Germany

Gordon Sterne was a German-born English actor with a prolific career spanning over five decades in film, television, and theater. He is perhaps most widely recognized for his role as Mr. Kessler in the horror-comedy classic An American Werewolf in London (1981), where his character famously meets a gruesome end while watching The Muppet Show in a dream sequence. He left his native Nazi-dominated birth country in 1941 and became a native of Windsor, Ontario with a father who worked in the tobacco business and mother, who was supportive of his theatre aspirations. Sterne studied economics at the University of Western Ontario before volunteering for the Canadian Army in 1944, serving in the infantry as a sergeant. Heading to New York in 1945, he trained and graduated from the Dramatic Workshop under the tutelage of its founder Erwin Piscator, at the same time as Rod Steiger, Bea Arthur, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis and Harry Belafonte. Sterne then began his acting career in America, working on radio and TV, in summer stock and off-Broadway. After a career on stage, playing the leading man in various plays in New Jersey during the 1940s, as well as Benvenuto Cellini in The Firebrand at Washington's Arena Stage and Joseph K in The Trial at New York's Provincetown Playhouse during the early 1950s, Sterne moved to Britain in 1956 where he had over 50 years working in theatre, TV and film. Being able to speak German (and French) enabled Sterne to perform in Drop Dead Darling on tour in Germany as well as a spell with the English Theatre in Vienna.Read more

Movies & web series

Espionage

Screaming Blue Murder

Jeeves and Wooster

The Tudors

Doctor Who

UFO

The Prisoner

An American Werewolf in London

The Saint

Hancock's Half Hour

Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death

Reilly: Ace of Spies

The New Avengers

Rating Notman

Second Verdict

Highlander

Melissa

John and Yoko: A Love Story

Taste of Fear

The Fur Collar

The Child and the Killer

The Assassination Bureau

Libel

The Adding Machine

The Razor's Edge

Merlin

Laws of Attraction

The Protectors

Armchair Theatre

Out of This World

The Millionairess

The Great Van Robbery

Battle of the V-1

The Vulture

Four Play

Sex Play

A Promise of Bed

The Gangster Show: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui