Actor Victor Lundin Dies at 83
Mia Walsh Victor Lundin, a frequent tough guy in films and on television who played the alien slave Friday in the 1964 sci-fi cult classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars, has died. He was 83.
Lundin died June 29 in Los Angeles after a long illness, Douglas Dunning, director of acquisitions and the newly appointed head of production for Cinema Epoch, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
The Chicago native was the first actor to appear onscreen as a Klingon on NBC’s Star Trek, playing a lieutenant on the episode “Errand of Mercy” first broadcast in March 1967. He also was one of The Penguin’s (Burgess Meredith) henchmen on Batman and played Chief Standing Pat opposite Cliff Robertson as the cowboy crook Shame in another episode of the campy 1960s ABC superhero series.
In Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Byron Haskin’s adaptation of the Daniel Defoe novel, Lundin stars as Friday, an alien slave who is found and eventually rescued by marooned Commander Draper (Paul Mantee).
A trained opera singer in high school who went on to graduate from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Lundin portrayed Machine Gun Kelly in Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (1960). He also had roles in Robert Wise’s Two for the Seesaw (1962), Island of Love (1963), Promises … Promises! (1963), George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Beau Geste (1966).
On television, Lundin showed up on such shows as Gunsmoke, The Time Tunnel, Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Mannix and Babylon 5.
