‏Bela Kovacs‏

Actor, director, artist, sculptor, violinist and teacher, born in the USA but raised in Czechoslovakia from age five until age twenty. He was a child actor in a number of Hungarian productions. At his parents' direction he joined a Presbyterian clerical institution in Ontario to become a minister, but while there he received an urgent telegram from Bela Lugosi (whom he had met while acting in Europe) asking him to join a touring company to fill a role. He told a lie to obtain a leave of absence from the academy, and never returned. During World War II he served as a translator for American military intelligence, then afterwards joined the Pasadena Playhouse, while working evenings as a cafe violinist, before reaching a nationwide audience on TV's "Space Patrol". Finding himself typecast after the series ended, he came to New York and found work directing the short-lived off-Broadway play "The Detectives". But the Hungarian revolution started in 1956, and he traveled to Austria to assist refugees. Returning to New York the next year, he joined Manhattan's prestige Dalton School as a professor of art and acting, a teaching career which lasted 22 years.