An American actor, born on January 9, 1925, in Somerville, New Jersey, and is of Dutch descent. His first acting experience was on stage where he got a small role in the play Mr. Roberts, in which director Stanley Kramer watched him and assigned him the role of the villain Jack Colby in the movie High Noon (1952). His sharp features made him the ideal choice for playing evil roles in many American Western films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and For a Few Dollars More (1965), but his most famous international movie is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). In the eighties, he co-starred in the wonderful movie Escape from New York (1981) before he died of a heart attack in Oxnard, California on December 16, 1989.