| Interment Location | Visited | |
|---|---|---|
| Hollywood Hills, CA | April 4, 2023 |
At two years of age, Syrian-born Lebanese actor Michael Ansara immigrated to the United States. Raised in Massachusetts and California, he went on to attend Los Angeles City College; perform at the Pasadena Playhouse alongside Charles Bronson, Carolyn Jones and Aaron Spelling; and build an acting career worthy of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ansara married three times and raised a son, Matthew, with his second wife, I Dream of Jeannie actress Barbara Eden. Matthew, who followed in his parents’ footsteps and became an actor, died of a heroin overdose in 2001 at age 35. He was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. Twelve years later, Michael Ansara — who lived to the far riper age of 91 — was consigned to the earth beside his only child. Their flat grave markers appear in the foreground of this image, with the son’s on the left and the father’s at center-right. Starlet Bette Davis’s sarcophagus can be seen in the distance between shrubs on the left.
In part, Ansara’s epitaph canonizes him as a “Most Precious Beloved Husband” and the “Best Dad.” A verse on its bottom half reads “Forever/Grows My Love/For You…/Yet Deeper Still,/Beyond All Knowing.” It is signed “Your Beverly” by Ansara’s spouse for 35 years — from 1978 until his 2013 passing — Beverly Kushida. Before Kushida and before Eden, Ansara was briefly wed to Jean Byron. A few years after her 1956 divorce from Ansara, Byron landed the role of matriarch Natalie Lane on The Patty Duke Show.
Ansara acted in many movies between 1944 and 1999, but his best-remembered credits were in television shows. Native American roles were Ansara’s most common work. His breakthrough performance was as a fictionalized version of the nineteenth century Apache chief Cochise on the ABC program Broken Arrow. A total of 72 episodes were produced from 1956 to 1958. “Cochise could do one of two things,” he once said in frustration: “stand with his arms folded, looking noble; or stand with his arms at his sides, looking noble.” For one season he was the lead of the series Law of the Plainsman, in which he portrayed a Harvard-educated Apache named Sam Buckhart who worked as a deputy marshal. Ansara appeared alongside wife Barbara Eden in multiple roles on I Dream of Jeannie, including a turn as the villainous Blue Djinn. He also acted as the Klingon commander Kang in the Star Trek franchise, initially in the 1968 original series episode “Day of the Dove.” He reprised the character of Kang decades later, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1994 and on Star Trek: Voyager in 1996.
Ansara guest-starred in my all-time favorite television episode: “Heart of Ice” on Batman: The Animated Series. The 1992 episode birthed a reimagined version of the Dark Knight’s cold-powered nemesis Mr. Freeze, transforming him from a gimicky villain reflective of the light-hearted comic books of the 1950s and campy 1960s television series into a figure with a tragic backstory in search of vengeance. Ansara’s memorable monotonic vocal performance as Freeze was guided by series showrunner Bruce Timm. “He was acting too much,” Timm said of Ansara. “It was really frustrating for him. He had never done cartoons before and an actor’s first natural instinct is to act. He kept giving these line readings with all this inflection in them. I kept telling them that it had to be less, a lot less — like a robot. He kept saying it sounded so flat. Everybody else was looking at me too, and was asking me if I was sure. To them it sounded flat. I think it really sells it. I wanted his voice to sound like the Ebonites in that old Outer Limits episode, ‘Nightmare.’ They sound real metallic and hollow. I even played that for him at the recording session and explained that was what I wanted it to sound like. It drove the sound guys crazy doing it.” Ansara continued to voice the rogue sporadically for the next nine years, concluding his run with the video game Batman: Vengeance in 2001. Ansara’s icy vocals can also be heard in the 1994 B:TAS episode “Deep Freeze,” the direct-to-video movie Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero, the 1997 episode “Cold Comfort” from The New Batman Adventures, and a 1999 episode of Batman Beyond titled “Meltdown.” Ansara was the second B:TAS actor I paid my respects to on April 4, 2023, having visited the voice of Mayor Hamilton Hill, Lloyd Bochner, at Westwood Village Memorial Park four hours earlier.
Fast Facts
Born: April 15, 1922 in Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon
Spouses: Jean Byron (m. 1949 or 1955-1956); Barbara Eden (1958-1974); Beverly Kushida (m. 1978-2013)
Died: July 31, 2013 in Calabasas, California
Cause of Death: Complications from Alzheimer’s Disease
Age: 91
Interment: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California
"[...] I did another television series where I played another Indian. And after the second series I went two years without working at all, because in those days they typecast us. When you play one thing, and if you play it well, and I think I played it well [...] they would type you. It'd be difficult to get other roles. And therefore I said, 'I do not want to play another Indian until I can break the mold.' But in this day and age we don't typecast as much as we did then, so naturally I will play whatever role that comes along that is really good."
- Michael Ansara
1979 in an interview with Austin, Texas, television personality Carolyn Jackson
In February 1960, Ansara received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the medium of television. This commemorative marker is located at 6666 Hollywood Boulevard.
I created this colored pencil drawing of Michael Ansara’s Mr. Freeze sometime in either my late high school or early college years.
One morning during a light snowstorm in 2020, I did what any self-respecting Batman fan would do: I used the fallen flakes as the background for some Mr. Freeze photography. Because I was trying not to show the railing on my back porch, I had to angle my camera in such a way that did not fully compliment the animation-accurate details of the Mondo 1/6 scale Mr. Freeze figure.
Sources Consulted and Further Reading
“The Carolyn Jackson Collection, no. 66 – Interview with Michael Ansara (1979).” From Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Accessed July 21, 2023. https://texasarchive.org/2010_01471.
IMDb. “Batman: The Animated Series Heart of Ice Trivia.” Accessed July 23, 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0519590/trivia/?item=tr4183379.
IMDb. “Michael Ansara (1922-2013).” Accessed July 23, 2023. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0030516/.
Peterson, Alison J. “Michael Ansara, Actor Who Played Cochise and Kang, Dies at 91.” New York Times. August 2, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/arts/michael-ansara-actor-who-played-cochise-and-kang-dies-at-91.html.
Timm, Bruce, Paul Dini, and Eric Radomski. “’Heart of Ice’ Audio Commentary.” Disc 2. Batman: The Animated Series Volume One. DVD. Directed by Bruce W. Timm. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Animation, 2004.
