Arnold Moss Collection

Arnold Moss
(1910 – 1989)

If we were to try and sum up the life of character actor Arnold Moss in just a few words, we would have to say that he was an actor’s actor, the sort of performer who lived his whole life in order to perform, in whatever role or whatever media he was able to, whether the stage, movies, TV or radio.

Moss was born in Brooklyn in 1910, and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of City College of New York. He apprenticed as an actor and director with Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre Company in New York, and won his first chance on Broadway while on the staff of the speech and theater department at Brooklyn College, playing a ruthless colonel in Hemingway’s "The Fifth Column".

His film background was respectable, if not as complete as his stage resume. He was often cast as the villain, a role he seemed to relish as a way to burn himself into the audience’s memory. Moss appeared in Temptation (1946), Border Incident (1949), Kim (1950), Viva Zapata! (1952) and other films.

Just as they did in Hollywood, actors turned to radio as a way to keep working between major projects, and Moss’s radio work included appearances on Columbia Workshop, Theater of Romance, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Molle Mystery Theater, Cabin B-13 and CBS Radio Mystery Theatre.

One of Moss’s greatest accomplishments was engendering a love of Shakespeare in American audiences. He headed his own company, the Shakespeare Festival Players, who toured more than fifty colleges and universities in the U.S. Moss would comment that American’s developed a greater appreciation for the Bard when they heard his language in a familiar accent rather than "the more formal inflections of companies from abroad."

It was as the leader of a traveling Shakespearean company that Moss made one of his most memorable television appearances. The twelfth episode of the first season of the original Star Trek series was "The Conscience of the King", where the Enterprise is transporting the Karidian Players between planets. The episode deals with Captain Kirk’s memory of "Kodos the Executioner" and the possibility that Karidian may actually be the mysterious Kodos.