Erich von Stroheim Jr. on AllMovie

The older of two sons of director/actor Erich Von Stroheim (1885-1957), Erich Von Stroheim Jr. was born in 1916; his mother was Mae Jones, who was briefly the second wife of the filmmaker. Erich Von Stroheim Jr. showed up as a baby in Charles Chaplin's Easy Street (1917), and made a few acting appearances in the late '20s and early '30s, but most of his career credits dated from the early '50s and after. In 1953, he joined the syndicated television production company Ziv-TV, serving as an assistant director on I Led Three Lives and Science Fiction Theatre, the latter produced by Ivan Tors. He served as assistant director on Budd Boetticher's independently produced drama The Magnificent Matador (1955), Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958, in which he made an uncredited onscreen appearance), and George Marshall's comedy The Gazebo (1959). The latter two films were made at MGM around the time Von Stroheim was working on the occult-thriller series One Step Beyond. He spent the next few years moving between MGM and Universal, in between small-scale dramas like Phil Karlson's The Secret Ways (1961), Jack Arnold's comedy Bachelor in Paradise (1961), and Vincente Minnelli's outsized The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962). Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) had him serving as assistant director and also as an actor in a small role, as Ravinski. Von Stroheim was an assistant director on the World War II series Combat and the spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., around the time of his work in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963). His last film projects -- Once a Thief (1965), Mister Buddwing (1966), and Don't Make Waves (1967) -- were all MGM productions (as was The Man From U.N.C.L.E.). Around a stint on the David Dortort-produced series The High Chaparral, Von Stroheim worked on the Western The Last Challenge (1967). He died in late 1968, of cancer, after working on The Thousand Plane Raid and -- arguably the best film project of his career -- Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, both of which were released in 1969.