Alfred Ryder

Alfred Ryder (born Alfred Jacob Corn; January 5, 1916 – April 16, 1995 ) was an American television, stage, radio, and film actor and director, who appeared in over one hundred television shows. Career Ryder began to act at age eight and later studied with Robert Lewis and Lee Strasberg. He eventually became a life member of The Actors Studio. During the 1930s and 40s, Ryder blended Broadway appearances with two memorable roles during the Golden Age of Radio, as Molly Goldberg's son Sammy in The Goldbergs; and as Carl Neff in Easy Aces. During World War II he served in the United States Army Air Forces and appeared in the Air Force's Broadway play and film Winged Victory. In 1946 he secured a one-year film contract with Paramount and had a role in the Anthony Mann-directed film noir T-Men (1947). Ryder was an ambitious and intense theater performer who aspired to be "the definitive Hamlet of his generation." In the 1940s he joined the American Repertory Theatre, founded by Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne; Webster's follow-up troupe, the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company—for which he toured as Hamlet; and ultimately The Actors Studio. In the 1950s he continued appearing on Broadway (supplemented with television work), his most fruitful years coinciding with his 1958-1964 marriage to renowned stage actress (and fellow Actors Studio member) Kim Stanley, whom he would direct in the 1961 Broadway hit A Far Country.