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Alan Oppenheimer

Alan Oppenheimer has built a remarkably varied career across film, television, stage and voice acting. Born in New York City on April 23, 1930, he became the kind of character performer who could move easily between live-action drama, broad comedy, science fiction and animation. His television work shows that range particularly well. On Hogan’s Heroes, he played both a Nazi and a Hollywood movie star, while Get Smart cast him as an Israeli secret agent and, separately, a double-agent KAOS scientist. He took over the role of Dr. Rudy Wells in The Six Million Dollar Man beginning with the second pilot film, Wine, Women and War. Oppenheimer also appeared as Mickey Malph on Happy Days and had a recurring role as Ira, Helen Rosenthal’s husband, during the first two seasons of St. Elsewhere. Science-fiction viewers may know him as Westworld’s head IT technician or from his appearances across three Star Trek series. Each visit brought a different part: the Klingon cleric Koroth in The Next Generation, Starfleet Captain Declan Keogh in Deep Space Nine and an alien ambassador in Voyager. On stage, he played filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille in the 1994 Broadway production of Sunset Blvd. For many viewers, however, Oppenheimer’s voice work is the main attraction. His Filmation roles included Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Mer-Man in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, along with Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon and Prime Evil in Ghostbusters. In The NeverEnding Story, he voiced Falkor, Gmork, Rockbiter and the Narrator, an unusually broad collection of characters within a single film. He also supplied the contrasting voices of the pacifist Beachcomber and the combative Warpath in The Transformers. Later credits continued across animation, movies and games, including Prometheus in God of War II, Alfred Pennyworth in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and Old Timer in Toy Story 4. It is a career defined less by one screen identity than by the sheer number of distinct characters Oppenheimer has found a voice for.