Mike Kellin

Career

Mike Kellin made his Broadway debut in 1949 with At War with the Army and repeated his role in the 1950 film version starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He performed in roughly fifty plays over his career, winning an Obie Award for his work in American Buffalo. In 1955, he received a Tony nomination for his acting in the musical Pipe Dream.

The following year, he contributed the song "Preserven El Parque Elysian" to a rally supporting Elysian Park; Pete Seeger recorded it for his 1965 album God Bless the Grass. Kellin appeared in both the film The Wackiest Ship in the Army and the television series based on it. In 1966, he played Myko on the Lost in Space episode "The Deadly Games of Gamma 6." He also appeared on the TV Western Gunsmoke, in The Twilight Zone episode "The Thirty Fathom Grave," and as a Southerner in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode "Night of the Owl."

Personal life

Kellin married Nina Caiserman in 1952, and the couple adopted a daughter before Nina's death in 1963. In 1966, he married actress Sally Moffat, daughter of actress Sylvia Field. He was an advocate for prisoners' rights, serving on the Rockland County Legislature's Blue Ribbon Commission on Criminal Justice from 1968 to 1973 and remaining active with the Fortune Society. He died of lung cancer on August 26, 1983, in Nyack, New York, at age 61, and was interred at Emanuel Synagogue Cemetery in Wethersfield, Connecticut.

Did You Know?

• Kellin's younger sister Shirley Ann died in the 1944 Hartford circus fire.
• He served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II.
• He studied acting and playwriting at the Yale School of Drama after the war.
• Kellin wrote the song "Preserven El Parque Elysian" for a rally supporting Elysian Park in 1956.
• His final film role was in Sleepaway Camp, released posthumously in 1983.