Anders Randolf on AllMovie

In a 1922 article in the Toledo Blade, veteran character actor Anders Randolf summed up his career in motion pictures: "I've been shot; I've been stabbed to the heart; I've been electrocuted: I've drowned; fallen off a cliff; dropped dead from heart failure. In fact, I've died or been killed in every photoplay I've appeared in." A professional soldier in the Danish army and a world-class swordsman, Randolf had emigrated to the United States in 1895, quickly giving in to a lifelong passion for the theater. After touring with Vaughn Glaser, William Farnum, and Henrietta Crossman, the imposing character actor entered films with Vitagraph in 1912 and remained with that company through the 1910s. After briefly heading his own production entity, Frontier Features, Inc., Randolf settled into a career as one of Hollywood's top screen villains, co-starring in such well-known feature films as D.W. Griffith's The Idol dancer (1920) and The Love Flower, John Barrymore's Sherlock Holmes (1922), and Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926). He was Greta Garbo's ill-fated husband in The Kiss (1928), the Swedish diva's final silent film, and was both seen and heard in the Laurel and Hardy comedy classic The Night Owl (1930). By then, however, Randolf had tired of the grind of movie making and was actively planning a return to his home country of Denmark when succumbing to the after-effects from a kidney operation.