...as Harry Mudd in 1966.
Roger C. Carmel was a rotund character actor and sometime comedian whose trademark was a handlebar mustache. He is most famous for playing the role of Harcourt Fenton "Harry" Mudd on Star Trek: The Original Series. He also voiced the character in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. With the exception of those actors who played USS Enterprise crew members on the series, Carmel is the only actor to play same character in more than one episode of TOS.
Born on September 27th, 1932 in Brooklyn, New York, Carmel broke into film and television in 1958. That year, he made an uncredited appearance in the film Stage Struck. Starring in that film were fellow Star Trek alumnus Christopher Plummer and John Fiedler.
Carmel went on to have larger roles in the films A House Is Not a Home (1964, with Stanley Adams), The Silencers (1966, with James Gregory, Grant Woods, and Nancy Kovak), Gambit (1966, with John Abbott and Vic Tayback), Skullduggery (with William Marshall and Booker Bradshaw), Thunder and Lightning (1977, with George Murdock and Charles Napier), and Hardly Working (1980, with Susan Oliver).
Carmel is also well remembered by fans of the 1966 Batman television series as Colonel Gumm, a stamp obsessed, identity swapping villain who very nearly gummed, perforated, and coiled Batman and Robin. He was also a regular on the TV sitcom Mothers-in-Law from 1967 through 1968. In 1981, he co-starred with TNG actress (and fellow two-time TOS guest star) Diana Muldaur in a short-lived TV series called Fitz and Bones; he and Muldaur would reprise their characters the following year in a Fitz and Bones TV special called Terror at Alcatraz.
In his later career, Carmel performed primarily as a voice actor, most notably for the animated series The Transformers, on which Michael Bell also worked. He and Bell would go on to voice for the feature-length Transformers: The Movie, along with TOS star Leonard Nimoy.
Carmel continued to work steadily until 1986, when, on November 11th, Carmel died at the age of 54.
- The circumstances of Carmel's death are heavily debated; the Internet Movie Database states that the cause of death was hypertensive cardiomypathy, a heart disease consequential to high blood pressure. However, there are some reports which state that he had commited suicide, possibly via an intentional drug overdose. Nonetheless, the official ruling is apparently a form of cardiomypathy brought on by an accidental drug overdose (see [1] and [2]).
Appearances
- TOS: Mudd's Women as Harcourt Mudd
- TOS: I, Mudd as Harcourt Mudd
- TAS: Mudd's Passion as Harcourt Mudd (voice)
External Links
- Template:IMDb-link