Quick Facts
Biography
Joseph Bernard (December 12, 1923 – April 3, 2006) was an American actor and acting teacher who appeared in 25 Broadway plays and several movies and TV appearances in the 1950s through 1970s.
Bernard was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and studied at New York's New School for Social Research with noted acting teacher Stella Adler. One of his New School classmates was Marlon Brando.
Bernard was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the D-Day invasion of France. After the war, appeared in the play Winter Soldiers and then Skipper Next to God, directed by Lee Strasberg and starring John Garfield, with whom he became friends. Garfield was Bernard's best man at his marriage to his wife, Bina, whom he wed in 1952. Bina died in 2001.
Bernard appeared in Murder, Inc., the 1961 Stanley Kramer film Judgment at Nuremberg, in which he played an assistant to the American prosecutor, played by Richard Widmark, and a number of other films that included Ice Station Zebra. His television roles included appearances on Star Trek, The Twilight Zone (in the 1961 episode The Shelter), and Mission: Impossible.
In 1968, executive director and teacher at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in Hollywood. He moved to Las Vegas in 1979 and established the Joseph Bernard Acting Studio.
He is Molly Bernard's grandfather.
Selected filmography
- Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
- Ice Station Zebra (1968)
- The Baby 1973
- The Laughing Policeman (1973)
- The Man Who Loved Women (1983)
- Heat (1986)
- Mikey (1992)
- Warlock: The Armageddon 1993