Vladimir Nikolayevich Sokoloff (Russian: Владимир Николаевич Соколов; December 26, 1889 – February 15, 1962) was a character actor on stage and particularly in film.

Biography

Sokoloff was born in Moscow, Russia. He became an actor and assistant director with the Moscow Art Theatre, before emigrating to Berlin in 1923. With the rise of Nazism, he moved first to Paris in 1932, then to the United States in 1937.

He appeared in a number of Broadway plays from 1927 to 1950. He also quickly found work in American films, playing characters of a wide variety of nationalities (he himself once estimated 35), for example, Filipino (Back to Bataan), Greek (Mr. Lucky), Arab (Road to Morocco), Romanian (I Was a Teenage Werewolf), Chinese (Macao), and Mexican (The Magnificent Seven). Among his better known parts are the Old Man in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Anselmo in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he also appeared on a number of television series, including three episodes of CBS's The Twilight Zone ("Dust", "The Gift" and "The Mirror"). On January 1, 1961, Sokoloff guest starred as "Old Stefano", a wise shepherd, in the ABC/Warner Brothers western series Lawman, with John Russell and Peter Brown.

He was a pupil of Stanislavski, but in a 1960 newspaper article, he rejected Method acting (as well as all other acting theories).

After a long career, he died of a stroke in 1962 in Hollywood, California.