He also played a Klingon in Star Trek The Motion Picture, and a Romulan Commander in the episode Balance of Terror of the original series.

[3][4] He joined the United States Army in 1943 and trained to be a paratrooper during World War II; he did not see combat, and was discharged in 1946 as a technical sergeant.

After earning a master's degree in theater and speech from the University of Michigan, he became known in New York City for serious drama, including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov.

In the mid-1960s, he moved his family to Los Angeles, where he played the recurring role of Dr. Ernest Gregory in Another World, and one of the Three Wise Men in the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

He played the prosecutor in Fort Grant in the Clint Eastwood film Hang 'Em High (1968), and the hostile gorilla Urko in the television series Planet of the Apes.

In The Radicals (1990), which recounted the beginnings of the Swiss Anabaptist movement in the 1520s, he played a composite historical character, Eberhard Hoffman, a Catholic bishop who serves as prosecutor in the trial of his former abbot Michael Sattler.